If on your way to the theater you collide with another vehicle while traveling at 75 m.p.h., chances are you simply won’t be able to run a comb through your locks and still make the first curtain.
It would be foolhardy to think so. Yet based on the results of the latest Insurance Institute for Highway Safety mini-van crash tests, you might be led to believe that you should escape from such a collision unscathed–and if you don’t, your mini-van is simply unsafe.
The Insurance Institute last week released the results of its mini-van crash tests via “Dateline,” the TV subsidiary of the insurance industry trade group. The institute used to release the results via USA Today, but it appears “Dateline” has more viewers than USA Today has readers, and institute President Brian O’Neill looks better with pancake makeup on his face than newsprint on his hands, so “Dateline” gets the nod.
Why mini-van crash tests? Because mini-vans have been a growth market, millions are on the road and owners often transport kids. You get a lot more folks paying attention to mini-van crash test results than you would crash tests of Lamborghini Diablo sports cars–and a lot more sympathy.
Anyway, the institute ran nine mini-vans into a concrete barrier at 40 m.p.h. and concluded that the Ford Windstar would be its vehicle of choice, the Pontiac Trans Sport its vehicle of chance, if you were to duplicate the stunt at home.
Windstar was the only van avoiding a “marginal” to “poor” rating, meaning it was judged the best of the worst. It would be easy for people to conclude that most mini-vans, therefore, aren’t safe.
We don’t mean to treat crashes in a flip manner. Nothing is as precious as a human life, but the institute crash tests have a few folks scratching their domes in disbelief. The tests end up labeling vans either as safe or unsafe, but there’s no mention of death in such crashes, simply references to leg injuries, possible neck injuries, and in the case of Trans Sport, a severed foot when the test dummy lost that limb in the crash.
The institute performed an offset crash test, which means rather than running head-on into the barrier, the vehicles were run so that only 40 percent of the front of the vehicle on the driver’s side was impacted.
The problem, the auto industry insists, is that only an estimated 0.04 percent of all accidents involve offset collisions.
And the test was run at 40 m.p.h., which doesn’t sound like warp speed, but consider that based on the laws of physics and crashes, running a vehicle into a fixed barrier at 40 m.p.h. is the equivalent of running a vehicle into a parked car at 75 m.p.h.
Don’t know about you, but if we were able to escape a 75 m.p.h. collision into a parked car with just a leg injury and not exit the scene zipped in a body bag, we’d have to say the vehicle was relatively safe.
If the institute had concluded that at 75 m.p.h., occupants could pick themselves up, dust themselves off and start all over again, the nation would have been in a state of euphoria.
But by concluding that driving at 40 m.p.h., which sounds like a relatively low speed, into a fixed barrier at an offset angle, occupants would have suffered injury and in one case loss of a limb (foot), the nation instead faces a state of panic–or at least those who aren’t hiding in a cave waiting for their air bag to kill them would find themselves in a state of panic.
“Our problem isn’t with the institute tests as it is with the misinterpretation of the tests that the vehicles are unsafe,” said General Motors Corp. spokesman Ed Lechtzin.
Current government (not institute) crash tests call for automakers to build vehicles that withstand a 30 m.p.h., not 40 m.p.h., impact into a fixed barrier head-on, not at an angle, without injury to occupants.
The mini-vans all meet that test–they have to–even if they don’t meet the institute test. If the government required that mini-vans run into a fixed barrier at 50 m.p.h. without the inside rearview mirror slipping out of alignment, the automakers would fuss and cuss, scream about costs, but eventually build vehicles that complied.
So what we have is the institute making up its own test for automakers to pass or fail. But, because most vehicles aren’t built to meet institute test procedures, you have to expect a rather high failure rate, just as you would expect a high failure rate if, in order to get your license to sell insurance in the U.S., you had to pass a test given in Arabic.
The automakers argue that the test was one designed to provide spectacular visuals on TV but at the same time one that automakers were guaranteed to fail.
What also puzzles some is O’Neill’s comment that, in general, vans have good on-the-road crash experience, being larger than many cars and generally driven by low-risk older, married drivers.
So what was the institute trying to prove?
“The crash test results reveal that injury risk in passenger vans would be even lower if all of them performed like the Windstar,” O’Neill said.
They also would perform better if designed to meet the institute standards rather than just the government standards, which they do meet.
The automakers criticized the findings as being alarmist, and as just one test on which a safe or unsafe rating was slapped on the contestants.
Ford Motor Co., maker of the Windstar, also is the producer of the Aerostar mini-van, which earned a “poor” rating based on occupant compartment damage and “substantial” upward and rearward steering-wheel movement.
“Once again, the institute’s overall findings give the erroneous impression that certain vehicles are not safe or only marginally so,” Ford said in a statement.
“We maintain that the institute conducts its tests at high speeds not reflective of real world crashes and intended to produce dramatic visual results with as much impact on the crash dummies as possible,” Ford added.
“The institute is a trade group, funded by and accountable to the insurance industry. Their acceptability criteria have as much to do with the cost to repair the vehicle and reducing claims payout for insurance companies as with actual safety protection provided to occupants,” Ford concluded.
There’s nothing wrong with championing the cause of lower repair and claim costs, but not at the expense of scaring the britches off of people in doing so.
First there were charges that air bags aren’t safe, and now there are charges that mini-vans aren’t safe. Rather than build new roads, maybe the government should start pouring more sidewalks.
