On 19/05/17 11:25, MrCheerful wrote:
On 12/05/2017 01:09, JNugent wrote:
On 11/05/2017 20:17, TMS320 wrote:

The mid-90's were not primitive times in automotive times. There is no
straightforward way of knowing the difference.

To be fair, perhaps Mr C's "20 or so years ago" needs to be read as
"more than 30 or so years ago".

worth looking at the test of a 2015 car to its identical version from
1998 The 98 is destroyed, the 2015 looks very survivable, so yes, just
20 years ago cars were far less safe for occupants and the general public.

http://www.msn.com/en-gb/cars/enthus...cid=spartanntp

Just a stunt. It only shows us the damage in an older car when hit by a
newer car that is 300kg heavier. They are not equivalent. The only valid
crash test is against a barrier, where the only energy in the system
comes from the car being crashed.

There is another issue. All that design can do is to raise the speed
where a crash is no longer survivable. eg, if a 20mph crash is benign in
an older car it should also be so in a newer one and there would be no
gain in being the newer one. Conversely, if a 70mph crash is not
survivable in a newer car, it is also unlikely to be survivable in an
older one and there would have been no disadvantage being in an older
one. So there is a spectrum of speeds over which injury starts,
eventually leading to death. For all the scary demonstrations, we have
absolutely no way of knowing where these threshold speeds are or by how
much they have moved up.

I put it that over the 20 years up to the late 90's things moved on
enormously in all aspects of car technology; vastly more so than they
have done over the last 20. The reduction in casualties was far greater
over the earlier period than the later one - ok, road engineering, seat
belts, speed, drink etc, also made a significant contribution. Since
then vehicle engineers seem to have been mainly asked to add decadence.