Chrysler's Marketing Mistakes (Forbes)

Which the Samart did. Of course, the 1.5 ft of crumple zone in the front and rear looks like it didn't actually do anything - but that's an illusion since the crushed car is hardly any different length than the un-crushed version.

That can't possibly be good for the occupants... I've run through the physics before on RAD, even with a 3' crumple zone anything over 70 MPH is dicey. The decel is not nice to the human body, passenger compartment integrity notwithstanding. Best defense against dying in a wreck is not to wreck in the first place.

nate

Well, for course. The Smart is engineered unlike all other cars as well in that the airbags are NOT considered supplimental devices OR primary devices. In Europe, they assume that you are wearing your seatbelts, so they give it an airbag and figure you are wearing the seatbelt.

Both devices must function together to make a high-speed crash surviveable, whereas the S600 it ran into would only need the driver to be wearing their seatbelt OR airbag.

Which means what when you put a child seat into a Smart? Since as you say the airbag is required, the infant is dead, even if in an approved car seat.

Ted

Um - it has A/C, ABS, a nice stereo, and a pretty comfortable seat.

It just isn't terribly large.

Oh - it has over 400 miles range with a full tank of gas.

I should have said for the driver. It's a Euro-style airbag as well - inflates slower since it is made as a secondary device(comparable to the new "second generation" aribags. Safe for even smaller adults.

Children?

There is a switch to disable the airbag. The passenger seat is several inches offest and farther back than the driver. It doesn't require the same level of protection. They were able to shave off several inches in width by making the seats offset.

The european crash tests showed the passenger suffering basically no damage even without the side airbag.

A lot of thought went into this little microcar. The only thing ius really lacks is size.

And safe for smaller adults and women. But you need both to work as the driver of these small cars.

In the U.S., the airbags must be designed as a primary device, despite all 50 states having a seatbelt law. Talk about stupidity. At least in Europe, they figure if you are defective enough to drive around without a seatbelt, they aren't responsible for your getting mangled.

An uncomfortable seat with gobs if legroom is infinitely preferable to a comfortable seat with no legroom, espically on a long trip. Also important is seat position, many vehicles keep your head from hitting the ceiling by having the seatback quite reclined, it is more comfortable to be sitting nearly vertically on long drives.

Ted

This is a stupid attitude, and I don't think it's actually one that is held in Europe, because seatbelt usage there is much higher. So, "they" have the luxury of being able to assume that most people are going to wear a seatbelt, thus "they" don't have to require airbags to be the primary restraint.

The reason this attitude is stupid is that with modern cars, the people that don't wear seatbelts generally don't actually die in the accidents, due to crush zones and all the other safety improvements. Instead, they survive but get mangled. This results in survivors who are either permanently maimed, or take a whole lot more time to recover. In the meantime they are out on disability, creating a drag on the economy.

In the US because seatbelt usage (despite 20 years of campaigning) is so low, if airbags wern't designed as primary retraints, you would create a lot more of these maimed survivors dragging the economy down, than in Europe. So, looking at the total cost to the economy, it is smarter to design the airbags as the primary restraint in the US, it is less hard on the economy that way.

Ted

In the US the bags are secondary to the shoulder belt not primary, hence the feds reference to air bags as SRS, Supplemental Restraint Systems. :)

mike hung

Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:

Mike, you're wrong.

US Federal Motor Vehicle Safety(?!) Standard 208 requires airbags be sized and calibrated so as to "save" an UNbelted, 50th-percentile (height and weight) male dummy. That makes them *PRIMARY* restraints by design and by law, regardless of the "secondary" terminology. Nomenclature does not change or determine fact.

M> In the US the bags are secondary to the shoulder belt not

This is a very intelligent way to design cars, actually, as their airbags are made to provide extra cushioning, much like side airbags do. The bags are roughly half as powerful upon discharge and are safe for smaller people and teenagers.

The airbags in most U.S. cars are made to save a unbelted male between 180 and 220 lbs. If you weigh half that as a smaller female, the thing will pound on you worse than the seatbelt ever would. In many cases, the smaller driver suffers greater injuries(or death in a few cases) than the collision would have done with the seatbelt alone.

The Eurpopean designs? No such problems.

But they must also pass tests with a dummy that is not wearing a belt, hence the high-powered designs we get over here.

'High-powered,' is a misnomer. I have no experience with European regs but in the US the difference is the 'speed' with which they deploy, not the 'power.' The driver and passenger bags are even different, one to the other, in the speed at which they deploy in the US. The passenger bag is larger and further from the individual than the drivers bag. We use different chemicals to form the gas that envelopes the bag because they must be fully inflated in the same time frame, even though they are of significantly different volumes. Newer systems have the ability to deploy at two different speed based on the weight of the passenger, as determined by a seat sensor that can send either a 3 volt or 5 volt signal to the microprocessor..

mike hunt

Joseph Oberlander wrote:

Nothing I have posted was incorrect, only your perception. What they do in Europe has nothing to do with what we do in the US. Anything you do or say will not change that. Only a change in the regulation, as determine by the Congress, will do that. That is not likely to happen very soon so why go on about it for over twenty posts?

mike hunt

Daniel J Stern wrote:

You posted:

That is factually incorrect.

DS

Wrong. Somewhat FEWER such problems, but its categorically incorrect to state that they have "no" such problems.

For my info, what is ADR and who determined the technical standard?

And, if it's so good, why don't we all adopt it? (Govt inertia?)

Thanks. DAS

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I know what FMVSS 200 is, and I can guess ECE Regulation 16. What is ADR 69?