One thing I have learned from my Serious Crash Unit colleagues is that bigger vehicles always come off better than smaller vehicles. Now, One way to deal with that is to buy a Hummer. The other is to drive defensively in whatever vehicle you choose, in case you come across some dickhead in his Hummer.
I reflect on how I view Volvos. They were regarded as the safest car in the world.Thing is, if the owner is a knob, he'll factor that in, and drive it less safely, knowing that he'll be better off when he crashes coz the car compensates for his dickhead driving.
A natural extension of that is that we should make vehicles less safe, and that'd cause people to be more careful. A few more would die, but that'd be the price paid for everyone to have more freedom.
I can see many sides to this discussion, but at the end of the day, what we have is what we have. It'll change sooner or later, probably later. Yes, I can see a day that crashing at 100 km/h won't be too big a problem. It's just not here yet. Look how far cars have come since Model T Fords, then imagine how far ahead they'll be in 2100.
One thing that won't have changed is that kinetic energy will still be a product of mass and velocity(squared). Ain't no exemption or tolerance on that fact.
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In my time servicing the largest busiest motorway network in Europe we had a rule of thumb, mass rules, i.e. .truck vs car= truck wins, car vs tree= tree wins, Bike vs car=car wins. There are exceptions but if you seek out the occupants of the less dense vehicle or object you will usually find your most injured victims and see to them first obviously. Pretty useful in a multi vehicle pile up in freezing fog.
Similarly, in collisions between police vehicles and civilians we would generally see to the civilians first as the same rule applies, the less dense people were usually the most hurt.![]()
Oh bugger
Agreed, although the silent ones could just be in shock, they could also be preparing to exit stage left. The vocal ones, though perhaps in considerable pain were still well enough to kick up a fuss so presumably had time on their side.
Again not a hard and fast rule but when you're faced with accident victims lying all over the shop you have to make a decision and quickly, so you could say speed was a factor in all road accidents eh![]()
Oh bugger
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