Car fatality rates are at historical lows, thanks in large part to steady increases in vehicle frame strength and rigidity. But as Newsweek reports, tougher vehicle frames make it harder for rescue teams to reach trapped passengers after a crash. Highway rescuers must purchase ever-more-expensive extraction tools to keep up with increases in frame strength, and are forced to work deeper and deeper into the "golden hour" between the accident and emergency-room treatment. Rescuers also have to be careful not to puncture hidden pressurized-gas cannisters (which fire side-impact airbags) or hidden electrical lines, requiring extra time to peel away interior plastics before extraction can begin. With rescue times climbing past the ten-minute mark and rescue equipment costing even the smallest towns upwards of $50k, there's a case to be made that stronger is not always better. Add this to our own reporting on the downsides of strengthened roof crush standards, and the automobile safety picture becomes increasingly… complex.
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The Golden Hour? I would have called it the Crimson Hour.
there’s a case to be made that stronger is not always better
Are there any numbers that would support this case? It would appear not, if car fatality rates are at historic lows as the opening sentence suggests. Safety almost always comes at an increased cost, but if the numbers are down, the numbers are down. I really don’t understand TTAC’s negative attitude towards safety improvements that clearly work. It’s fun and useful to point out the unintended consequences of progress, but I think it’s possible to do so without suggesting that the progress is bad.
A situation where someone may be trapped in a car that is more difficult to extract them from may have simply been a fatality in a less safe car. If it’s that much tougher to extract the person it’s noteworthy that rescue personnel need to learn new techniques of that their equipment needs to be improved. You can’t improve a single variable in this equation and expect all others to remain unchanged.
On the other hand, a case could be made that mandating features/equipment that provide marginal actual benefit might not be the best direction to go. That’s what got us to the point of the seriously overweight vehicles we have now.
@steronz
I think some of the more spirited drivers who read TTAC feel that the extra weight and cost penalty for sporting the ostensibly superfluous safety equipment is not worth it.
I could go either way. After finding out how heavy that Genesis Coupe will be my heart sank a little. But I imagine if I were to end up upside down in one I might be singing a different tune.
I’d have to agree with steronz. Just because Newsweek and certain rescue crews say so doesn’t make it so.
If cars are structurally superior, it would seem the “jaws of life” and other equipment might not be needed at all. If a roof doesn’t cave in on the occupant or the dashboard/footwell crumple around the occupant’s legs, maybe the occupant can be easily extracted by just opening the doors.
If it’s that much tougher to extract the person it’s noteworthy that rescue personnel need to learn new techniques of that their equipment needs to be improved.
A main point of the article is that this means towns and counties have to buy increasingly more expensive equipment to deal with what’s on the road now. Sure, it’s great for business but it’s also one of those hidden taxpayer expenses which requires either budget increases or opportunity costs.
As to the “negativity” and “suggestions that progress is bad,” I can only speak for myself. What I say is that this story is not reason to rush out and reinvent the safety wheel. This story offers an unexpected nuance to the safety paradigm (bingo anyone?), nothing more. Some kind of safety feature which addresses this issue would probably be worthwhile (if only for marketing) to the company who engineers it right.
If they would finally get around to inventing real light sabers, problem solved.
Are vehicles really that much stronger?
Those “jaws-of-life” I saw 25 years ago on a school visit to the fire station looked pretty powerful :-)
Edward :
I can understand both sides of the argument. My only point was that the increased safety would probably ensure that if emergency personnel did need to extract someone forcibly, the accident might have been a fatality otherwise. In this case, the safety features are a double edged sword.
I’m all for stepping back and assessing the whole situation. How many people does each feature really save in the end? Is it a statistically significant number? Is it worth incurring the cost to all manufacturers and customers if it’s only likely to save x number of lives?
In a way I feel as though people are starting to feel invincible in their vehicles and that is reflected in how little attention they often devote to the actual task of *driving*.
[tongue in cheek]
By making vehicle safety idiot proof, we’ve allowed idiots to flourish…
@ John R
And I would agree with that… I think we should be allowed to buy unsafe cars if safety isn’t important to us. But the editorial comment here isn’t, “stronger cars are less fun.” It’s not even, “stronger cars are safer, but have interesting side effects that make rescues more expensive.” It’s also not, “Stronger cars may actually cause a few deaths, which you might find interesting and/or unexpected, but they still save lives overall.” I’d have no problem with any of those conclusions, since they all seem to be true.
Instead, they went with, “stronger is not always better,” and by better I think they mean safer. That’s a bold statement that doesn’t appear to be backed up by fact. The same insinuation was made in the roof crush article. I think the media is frothing at the mouth to suggest that government safety standards are making people less safe, which would be a crazy huge story, but the facts don’t seem to fit that hypothesis unfortunately.
I believe the procedure for rescue personel is to first cut the positive lead on the battery rendering the airbag system(s) inactive. The specifications on a jaws of life tool can produce over 20k lbs of force and nearly double that when it is used for cutting. With specs like that I dont think that anything you want apart or cut won’t be a problem.
Paging Stephan Wilkinson, Stephan Wilkinson please report for duty.
First off, let’s use the correct terminology. Rescuers do not extract the injured person in the car, they extricate them.
Second, great strides have been made in extrication technology in recent years, mainly due to the hardened steel introduced in cars. Back in the day we just used the spreaders and ripped that car apart, it was a piece of cake. Nowadays relief cuts need to be made before the spreaders will work. Some of the new steel is too hard for the cutters to go through easily. Vehicle extrication is continually evolving with the vehicle structures.
Although I am retired from the fire service now, I can see these issues as being valid.
Life is full of tradeoffs, but one can always trust MSM organs like Newsweak to accentuate the negative. We were so much better off in Model T touring cars!
With safer vehicles, the emergency personnel can use their specialized tools and training to extricate the trapped victim, while with the less safe vehicle a spatula and some prodigious scraping works best.
It’s fair enough for Newsweek to raise the question, but the article doesn’t provide enough data to reach any conclusions as to whether these standards should be changed. The anecdotes are interesting, but it’s hard to draw any conclusions from them, other than that it is sometimes difficult to rescue some people due to the tougher metal.
To be able to assess the standards, it would be necessary to estimate how people die or suffer worse injuries due to rescue time delays caused by the build standards, and to compare that result to a projection of the additional deaths and injuries that would likely be caused by whatever weakened standards would be needed to allow the extrication equipment to work more effectively.
To make up some numbers, if lower standards permitted 100 people to be saved who otherwise would not have been during the “golden hour,” but killed off 200 more people due to the weaker protection, then it would make more sense to keep the standards. Obviously, that would suck for the 100 who pay for it, but would be offset by saving the other 200.
That being said, getting rapid treatment to accident victims is critical. Fatality rates in rural western states are higher in part for this very reason — it takes longer to get emergency medical services to rural accident scenes, and many people die waiting. I’m sure that there is a point where the cost of increased safety equipment becomes higher than the benefit, but where that point is, I don’t know.
All I know is that we can still buy motorcycles.
Why is it there is no choice between a “tank” and a motorcycle?
Maybe we need to allow for a new class of single occupant vehicles that allows for more risk to be taken by the driver, but can still allow for air conditioning and no helmet head. We could make them get 80 mpg and be GREAT.
I took some volunteer firefighting training, and I can tell you that those ‘Jaws of Life’ are plenty powerful enough to cut through anything. And the air chisels and other equipment readily available to every fire department is certainly able to rip apart any car on the road like it’s a soup can. Despite cars that are safer and tougher, the equipment is more than up to the task of extrication.
I’m with you, Landcrusher.
I always got a chuckle knowing that if I were to drive my Jetta without a seatbelt (not that I actually did – I take enough stupid risks), it would be considered unsafe and would get me a ticket. Yet my other (perfectly road-legal) ride was a 155 hp engine with 2 wheels and a seat, that could hit 100 MPH in second gear.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: we need to cool it with the whole “unsafe car” witch hunt; we need safer drivers, not safer cars. I would definitely buy a zippy, fuel-efficient car that weighed under a metric ton. Did someone say 1st or 2nd gen GTI? Something like that seems like a nice compromise between fun, safety and economy to me.
Or for $50k you could buy a T-Rex: carbon fiber body, 3 wheels, controls and seating of a car, pulls over 1.0g on the skidpad, and has a 200 hp motorcycle engine powering the huge rear tire in the back.
Oh, and keep the overpowered, under-protected motorcycles. I say keep us speed-freaks surrounded by as little metal as possible; it forces us to evolve or die.
Car fatality rates are at historical lows, thanks in large part to steady increases in vehicle frame strength and rigidity.
Fatality rates are lower. Yes, I’m certain there is a point of diminishing returns, but it doesn’t appear to have been reached yet.
Hmmm… reminds of the statistics thrown out whenever someone wants to justify medical care costs. Such as “Heart disease is the leading cause of death in America!!!!”
Sounds scary, until you think about it logically. Something is always going to be the “Leading cause of death in America”. As soon as they cure heart disease, then something else will become number 1.
You can’t win.
Here’s a reprint of an interesting article discussing the difficulty firefighters have experienced trying to cut through Subaru B-pillars.
link
I don’t mind at all having these beside me in my WRX.