Can lightweight cars be safe for people and the environment?
In a two-vehicle accident involving a Hummer and a Chevy Aveo, common sense seems to indicate you would be safer in the larger, heavier Hummer. But that doesn’t have to be the case, according to a new study.
A vehicle’s safety is dependent on its engineering - not it’s girth, said Laura Schewel, an analyst at the Rocky Mountain Institute in Snowmass, Colo.
Schewel’s reseach indicates a small, lightweight vehicle should perform just as well or better than a heavier one if it is designed differently.
Schewel presented her study last week in Detroit at the Society of Auto Engineers’ World Congress. In her work for the Rocky Mountain Institute, Schewel studies ways vehicles can be more environmentally friendly.
While environmental groups have long suggested decreasing a vehicle’s weight in order to reduce fuel consumption, others worry it would also compromise passenger safety.
Schewel said that is a misconception. Primarily, safety rests in the drivers hands. But she said a vehicle’s dimensions have more to do with safety than weight. “When you get into a car that’s big and light, that’s the ultimate safety,” Schewel said. “A car that is long and wide gives crush space and more materials to absorb energy in the right way.”
Shewel said injuries and fatalities occur when people come into contact with something - their own car, other objects involved in the accident or if they are thrown from the car. But if a car is spacious enough that no part of it comes into contact with its occupants during a crash, “ultimate safety” is achieved.
Of course, she calls that that height of safety because it would enhance safety for the environment as well.
“People have a very intuitive reaction to protect themselves,” she said. “It’s also right to be afraid of global warming. You should put those fears together and design to allay them simultaneously.”
Her finding impressed at least one group. The paper attracted a $200,000 grant from The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. The Rocky Mountain Institute will use the cash to conduct virtual crash tests on vehicles that weigh about half the average weight of today’s vehicles.
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Blech - talk about useless fluff.
The FACT is that if you’re in a small car - you’ll be creamed by a heavier one. I was surprised that the author of the piece didn’t point out that small cars have excellent crash ratings - and when hitting something else; the occupants will fare quite well.
No matter how you slice it we need to prepare to be living on 1/10 the energy we have now - and that means scrapping the concept of a personal car. It’s time to wake up and start planning for the future - not following the weed infused fantasies of Amory Lovins.
We need to build communities that are self sustaining, reduce our footprint and build a society that we want to live in. We have diets that are killing us - “science” such as food studies that fail to scream about how we are consuming the most calcium and having the highest rates of osteopourosis. We are not happy, not healthy and far from wealthy. We have a facade of wealth - while we trample the rest of the world - living off the maximum that the way to the top is to push everyone else down. Science is more often than not - not only the problem - but it can’t be the solution. The solution to an addiction is not more of the same. We must acknowledge the death of the American Dream, the result of over a hundred years of the delusion of bring “democracy” at the point of a gun - or blitzkreig of bombs, and work towards a future that all can participate in.
Rabid capitalism has failed - the world is destroyed, the population in overshoot, and economic and mineral/oil rape the norm.