Newsletter - March 2010

They Just Don’t Make Them Like They Used To

It is amazing to see the advances in crashworthiness from 50 years ago. When the 1959 Bel Air in this video was built, safety and crashworthiness were not a high priority in the design of most cars. There was little knowledge of how crash energy could be absorbed and managed to minimize injury to the occupants, although there were some exceptions. Saab introduced the first safety cage (reinforced passenger compartment) with their 1949 model 92. Also in 1949, Tucker had the first padded dash.

In 1958 Volvo patented the lap and shoulder belt and made it standard equipment on all their 1959 models. Air bags were developed by General Motors in the late 60s. Anti-lock brakes were first used on airplanes in 1929 to keep them from skidding when landing. The first computerized anti-lock brake system was introduced by Chrysler on the 1971 Imperial.

Three things that accelerated the development of safer cars were federal safety regulations, crash testing and computerized control and management systems. First, the National Highway Safety Board required seatbelts as standard equipment an all US cars beginning in January 1968 and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) made driver side airbags mandatory in 1989 and passenger side air bags mandatory in 1998. Many of today’s vehicles also have side air bags for chest protection and side curtain air bags for head protection in side impact crashes. The second advance is crash testing done by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety IIHS, NHTSA and others. On these websites you can find the safety ratings of new and used cars. Due to precision crash tests, cars can be designed to absorb crash energy in the front and rear crumple zones but protect the occupants. The potential injury to passengers can be gauged by sensors on the crash test dummies. In the crash on the video, the wheel comes all the way into the passenger compartment of the 1959 Bel Air. Finally, today’s vehicles use high speed micro processors to precisely control air bag deployment, seatbelt pretensioning and ABS activation.

Many new safety features are being implemented at the present time. Electronic stability control helps prevent cars from spinning out by applying brakes on only one or two wheels to counteract the rotational forces of turning too sharply. Adaptive cruise control uses radar or sonar to detect cars in front of the driver and slows the car down when it’s getting too close. The new Volvo XC60 will automatically apply the brakes when getting too close to another car. The Mercedes’ Pre-Safe System will sense if an accident is about to occur then it adjusts the seats to a safe position, pretensions the seatbelts then closes the windows and the sunroof.

Repairing crashed cars, while still partially an art, has become much more of a science. Safety systems need to be analyzed and computers scanned for any fault detection. Knowledge of materials and different types of steel and how they react to accident forces is necessary in order to implement the best repair plan. Structural members must be reinstalled with the same number of welds in the same places as original. Cars are no longer a conglomeration of parts, but a unit in which many things affect other things.

Today’s cars are much more complicated than in the past but a whole lot safer.

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Addison Auto Repair & Body Shop
2005 South Holly Street • Denver, CO 80222 • 303-691-9484