Crash test

Possibly because the SRS speed reduction lets the more open area passenger bag make it in time to cover the handle well with enough bag to be useful but the timing on the drivers side would be too tight?

 

Many car companies initially beefed up only their driver-sides in response to the offset test because that is the side that is tested. I read that the NHTSA even encouraged that so that manufacturers could make the driver safer quicker (there’s always a driver in the accident) and then add support to the passenger side down the line. I think they may be testing passenger offset crash worthiness in the next year or so?

Also, my thought would be the steering wheel is a pinch point that changes the way the airbag is shaped and deployed. Passengers don’t have a steering wheel...

 

Okay, but here are the NHTSA numbers:

• 53 percent: Occupants fatally injured in vehicles built between 1985 and 1992
• 46 percent: Occupants fatally injured in vehicles built between 1993 and 1997
• 42 percent: Occupants fatally injured in vehicles built between 1997 and 2002
• 36 percent: Occupants fatally injured in vehicles built between 2002 and 2007
• 31 percent: Occupants fatally injured in vehicles built between 2008 and 2012
• 26 percent: Occupants fatally injured in vehicles built between 2013 and 2017

Source: https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/812528

I’m glad my kids spend most of their car time buckled into modern child booster systems (with head side protection) in a 2017 Toyota with TSS.

 

Crash testing has always focused on the driver. Hence why you don’t see knee airbags on the passenger side even though the risk of injury is similar. This is also probably why the IIHS rates the Tacoma as only acceptable on the passenger side for frontal crash testing.

 

Okay I’ll bite, there’s no doubt that vehicles are getting safer, however I would challenge that those numbers don’t reflect the age of electronic assistance. They’re just not recent enough especially since even in the last period a small minority of vehicles would have systems like TSS.

I’ll also add that my kids ride in top end steel framed car seats in a CUV that outranks that Tacoma, and the Toyota vehicle in its class, but that’s besides the point. While I like that it’s highly rated safety wise it was never a feature for me since all vehicles that are current really are. I did not opt for the version of TSS on that vehicle but it did bite on somethings I do see value in like cross-traffic alert.

 

Honestly trucks are kind of death traps lol. Yes, their larger size is good in some collisions but they are prone to roll over, have poorer scores on the skidpad, and BOF construction really limits the engineering that can go into energy dissipation. While the pickups have come farther than I ever thought they would safety wise, I’m not sure I would buy into the belief some have that they are safer than a CUV which are often designed ground up to achieve the highest safety scores to please the soccer moms.

 

Yeah, agreed on the tech; also, some of its is decreasing safety with all of the distracting infotainment and touchscreen climate controls. And the numbers are always full of variables. Like, are the people who are driving older cars older and more susceptible to serious injury because of their age?

Your comment about improvements from the 90s is what I was thinking about, though, because it seemed like you were suggesting that the most recent safety changes don’t have much of an impact beyond marketing, whereas the NHTSA numbers posted above seem to suggest a sustained trend toward improved survivability that really changes most dramatically between 2007-10. Are you thinking crumple zones and airbags being the most important paradigm shift? I’m not disagreeing that a lot of good stuff happened in the 90s, but I’m trying to see where that fits with the data we do have.

 

I use to think the old massive cars would be like a tank in a wreck with a more modern car.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPF4fBGNK0U

 

The biggest change to vehicles in terms of fatalities was probably crumple zones. Once cars were designed to absorb an impact and spread out the energy of the impulse from the collision over a long duration of time, fatalities started to drop off. Some other small changes also lead to major reductions in injuries. I mean even something simple like active headrests probably have saved more lives than even airbags. Spinal injuries often killed drivers in accidents in the 70s even if the damage to the car looked minimal because there were no crumple zones and nothing to stop the head from whipping all over the place.

I picked the 90s because at the end of that decade that’s when trucks started receiving the changes that increased their crash safety. Those changes had started years before that in cars though, which again skews the numbers a bit.

What I’m getting at with my comments around more recent changes being less effective is that the big gains, as in dropping the fatality and long term injury rates another 20%, aren’t realistic with things like electronic addons. Sure they make driving safer but not to the level earlier changes did IMHO and they’re definitely marketed as being earth shattering.