September 16, 2021 • 46 mins
Crash testing has been around since the 1930s, but only got serious in the 1970s. Today we dive in and learn all about why companies and the U.S. government purposefully wreck cars.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of I
Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh,
and there's Chuck and there's Jerry over there, and this
is stuff you should know the podcast. All right, we've
done one on air bags, right, Which one did we
(00:25):
do that was all about like the crumple zones and
all that stuff. That's a great question, Chuck. I've been
really trying to figure that out. I think it must
have been Pinto's what was it. I know that we
talked a lot about car safety and engineering and how
I don't know, Man, I don't know. I'm suddenly creeped out.
(00:48):
Are you confident we have not done this one? I
would put my confidence at I searched so far and wide,
all right, which is we've three that is well above
the fifty threshold that we required to possibly rerecording. Like,
none of this, none of this seemed particularly familiar. We've
(01:10):
definitely talked about something like crumple zones, that kind of thing,
because we've talked about how cars we like I used
to think they were pieces of junk now, but they're
actually designed to come apart like that because in doing so,
they protect the people inside. We've definitely talked about that,
but and that really applies to what we're about to
(01:32):
talk about. But the actual details of what we're about
to talk about, I don't recognize them as familiar. Alright,
forward forward we go. So so cars have become exponentially
safer than they used to be. UM. There's, first of all,
hats off to not only the house stuff Works article
were working from UM, but also a Consumer Reports article
(01:53):
on crash testing that was really great, and then one
from Jelopnick that was a really great one about crash
testing your are And on that Gelopnic article, that's a
great website. It is, it's wonderful. UM. On that Gelopnic article,
they posted a YouTube video that made the rounds like
a few years back, UM, and it's a it's a
(02:13):
two thousand nine Malibu versus a nine bel Air and
they go head on and the the dummy and the
Malibu is like what, I didn't even notice anything, and
the person in the bell Air just disintegrates. Basically, the
crash test dummy and the bell are just disintegrates. Because
cars used to be made too to be sturdy. But
(02:36):
that's really bad for you in the car nowadays, they're
made to not be sturdy, and that moves the force
and the energy of the impact around the car and
not into you. And the reason why cars are so
much better these days now is because we started crash
testing them, and the people who test them, who crash
test them, started telling the public, Hey, this car doesn't
(02:59):
due very well in a crash test. Uh, this car
does really great in a crash test. And people started
to kind of sit up and listen and go, oh, wait,
we can survive a crash now if we buy a
certain car. Let's go buy that car. And then automakers
started to try to keep up and catch up, and
safety became an important thing. And again it was almost
exclusively thanks to crash testing. Yeah, car maker said, I
(03:22):
guess we all got to start making things go again
to nanny state. All right, So let's go back a
little bit. We'll talk very briefly about the history of
crash testing, because, like you said, in the early days,
it was basically, if a car performed well out there
on the road, um, then great, that's kind of we
(03:44):
care about driving the car, not crashing the car. Why
would anyone care about that? And then in nineteen thirty four,
General Motors said, you know what, maybe we should crash
a car because it turns out that you can die
when you crash these things, so maybe we should look
into this. So GM held the very first barrier test
(04:04):
at Milford Proving Ground in Michigan in n with an
unoccupied vehicle, and they would do this in different ways.
Sometimes they would like cartoon style, actually in both cases
cartoon style, just like release the emergency brake and give
it a push down the hill. Or they would say, hey, driver,
get in there, and as you approach that brick wall,
(04:25):
um jump out. And they said, okay, I guess that's fine. Um,
how much are you gonna pay me for that? I
don't worry about that, don't you a prisoner from a
chain gang? Nothing? Right? So uh, these early tests, again,
they weren't too protect people. They were just to try
and make sure the car could hold up a little better.
(04:47):
And so other car companies, as they started building cars,
started doing this. They didn't have proving grounds necessarily, so
sometimes they would even do this on public roads, which
was nuts. Uh. And then a ninth fifty two, a
man named Sam Alderson really changed the game when he
founded Alderson Research Laboratories, which would later on become something
(05:11):
you may have heard of called human eddics. Uh. They
were doing they won the very first contract to create
anthropomorphic dummies for testing airplanes and spacecraft, like ejection seats,
that kind of thing. And then eventually they said they
were using like sandbags and stuff like that, and eventually
they said, hey, wait a minute, you could do this
(05:31):
in cars too. So he got together with Sierra Engineering,
the Sierra Engineering Company, and created the very first crash
test dummy, Sierra Sam. Oh, that's right. We talked about
Sierra Sam in the Murphy's Law episode. Okay, maybe it's
just a bunch of stuff cobbled together. It makes me
think we did this one possible, But Sierra Sam came along.
(05:54):
They applied all these concepts to automotive testing. And Sam
Alderson is sort of a legend now. He side at
the age of ninety and two thousand five and was
posthumously inducted into the National Inventor's Halma Fame. In with
a lot of inventions, but largely this crash testumy patent
did one was the big one. Yeah, so was that
(06:16):
the one that was called the high hybrid three um
the Hybrid three and this is still human edics by
the way, that makes these Yeah, they're they're like the Yeah,
they're like as good as it gets with crash test dummy, create,
design and creation. Yeah, was when the hybrid three was
first developed, and then I think they upgraded it in
(06:36):
ninety one to take seatbelts into consideration, and then in
ninety seven to take air bags into consideration. And now
the standard and we'll get to why they did this,
is the H three five F meaning fifth female. So
the fifth, fifth percentile size wise female is the standard
(07:00):
me that's used. Now, that's great, and that's a huge,
huge progression because for decades and decades they used what
was known as the fiftieth percentile male dummy, which which
was yeah, five ft ten inches, hundred and seventy pounds.
And he was introduced from what I saw in nineteen
(07:22):
seventies six, at a time when the average male in
the United States was five ten hundred and seventy pounds. Well,
the average male in the United States has not been
five seventy pounds for a really long time. They the
average males gained about twenty five pounds and shrunken inch
since then, that's the average male in the United States now.
(07:45):
But the problem is is like these crash testers were
still using that that um fiftie percentile male male dummy
even though it didn't apply. And that's not to say
anything about child dummies, female dummies. Um they were. It
was basically like you know how when they test a
new drug, they tested on the healthiest, least vulnerable population
(08:07):
and then say it works. That's exactly what the history
of crash testing has done. Uh. And but only in
the last I don't know, probably ten ten years or
so have they really been like, no, we really need
to expand the types of dummies that we're using. So
they're coming up with they're using female dummies more frequently,
child dummies more frequently, obese dummies because apparently an obese
(08:30):
person is about seventy percent likelier to die in a
car accident than a non obese person. So they're now
creating obese dummies to get a better idea of just
how safe these actually are and as close to a
real world application as possible. Yeah, And I mean the
way I read this is at some point they said, well,
(08:51):
we need to make these safe for all drivers, So
what's the most vulnerable driver probably and they all said, well,
I guess a sixteen year old girl m is, you know,
statistically most likely to be probably the smallest version of
these dummies. So that's what they went with. They went
with the fifth percentile UH female hybrid three. And I
(09:14):
guess the reckoning is if it can be safe for them,
then it can be safe for that dumb, average male.
It's pretty great. Yeah, there's but it's still not required.
There's actually a representative, a congresswoman from d C named
Eleanor Holmes Norton, who just this past June introduced a
bill that would require UM crash testers to also use
(09:36):
UM female dummies too. So right now it's not it's
not range. Of course they should use. Range is just
sensible and so that you know, the people who do
crash testing are aware of this and they're starting to.
But there's one other thing I saw about crash test dummies. UM.
One of the things they can't replicate is tissue damage,
but even real damage like when when you do crash tests.
(09:59):
We'll talk to about a little more detail in a second,
but UM, when you use a dummy for that kind
of thing, they're outfitted with loads of different kinds of sensors,
hundreds of sensors, recording all this amazing data, and then
they take that data and they they basically turned it
into a statistical likelihood that that amount of force, that
(10:20):
amount of acceleration um, that amount of g's suddenly pressing
on your chest would cause an injury or not. That's
what crash test dummies do for us. But they don't
actually replicate like tissue damage or your leg falling off
or anything like that um because they're made to be
used over and over and over again so that they
(10:41):
could be subjected to the kinds of stuff that would
just destroy human body. So some crash testing chuck chuck.
Some crash testing uses post mortem human subjects. I wondered
if that's where this is going. A lot of post
mortem human subjects, some of them embalmed, which we failed
to mention in our embalming episode, some fresh. They call
(11:04):
them fresh because an embalmed one is just not going
to replicate the kind of yuck sure that a fresh
one well. And so that's a huge part of crash testing,
from what I can tell, is using post mortem human
subjects as well. Wow, that's amazing um. And we should
also point out maybe we'll take a break, but before
(11:25):
we take one, we should point out that this that
car companies do all kinds of internal crash testing before
they get to the regulatory crash testing because you don't
want to you don't want to fail those, So they
they'll crash eighty two d new vehicles in a line
before they even get to their regulatory bodies to do
(11:46):
their official crashes. And what we're mainly talking about is
those official crashes, but I imagine they're all pretty similar.
Now we should also say those official crashes there, they're
not even necessarily official. Basically, the NASH No Highway trans
Traffic Safety Administration has a bunch of guidelines, some of
them involving crashes, and then they basically say, these are
(12:08):
the guidelines. You met you you car makers better meet them,
but they don't go and actually like test the cars
for that. The crashing that they're doing is beyond the
minimum the law requires, so nobody's actually testing the the
auto makers cars to to see that they meet the
minimum requirements. It's just the threat of basically being sued
(12:32):
into oblivion for not meeting those minimum standards is um
is what keeps the car makers honest. And then that
and then one other thing I saw from that Jelopnick
article is the minimum legal standards that a car can
be put out on an American road are so low
that they they so vastly, like like under under meat, undersatisfy. Yes,
(13:02):
thank you, Charles, They so vastly undersatisfy what the average
American would be willing to get in and drive. That
just you know what Americans want to drive as far
as safety is concerned. Is one of is that that's
what carmakers are meeting, not just the minimum legal requirements.
So interesting, you're probably your car is probably going to
(13:22):
exceed those minimum legal requirements. You don't really have to
worry about that in the United States, right, and then
we'll talk about this at the end. Their tests completely
separate that done by the Insurance Institute for How We
Safety that are even more different, more robusts. Great set up,
my friend, Chuck, Great set up to you, my friend.
(13:44):
Can we just stop now or do we have to
come back? We probably already did this episode anyway, so
we can just stop, all right, Well we'll be back
right after this anyway. Well, now we're on the road
driving in your truck. Want to learn a thing or
two from Josh Chuck, you should know all right, all right,
(14:22):
so we laid the groundwork here. We know they're crashing
some cars a lot, all in the name of making
things safe for us. But we know that they're not saying, uh,
they're not like it's not like GM says, all right,
here's here's the car. Go tell us if it's okay.
It's it's a voluntary thing sort of um like good
luck selling cars if you don't. But sure it's voluntary.
(14:46):
And they're loaded with seven with sensors. Like you said,
they're accelerometers, h and accelerometers are going to measure acceleration
in a particular direction. They used this obviously to determine
if you might get injured. Um. Acceleration is the rate
at which speed changes. So if you're driving a car
(15:07):
and uh, you let's say there were no air bags
back in the day and no seat belts and your
head hits that windshield, the acceleration from your head flying
forward to hitting uh not zero because it's going to
go through the windshield. Um, but it's gonna decrease really
really fast, and that that rate of acceleration change is
(15:27):
the danger, and making car safe is all about softening
that and lessening that kinetic energy of your body and
that car's energy going from whatever speed it's going through
to zero. Yeah, because yeah, you and the car are
both traveling the same speed and you you both have
to stop pretty quickly. Um, you want to cut down
(15:50):
in the car transferring it's kinetic energy to you, and
then you want to cut down on your kinetic energy. Like,
if you're gonna have to transfer your kinetic energy is something,
let it be like an air bag or something like that,
rather than the dashboard. Right. So that's why they have
these accelerometers all over the place. They're in your head,
they're in the chest, they're in the pelvis, they're in
(16:12):
kind of everybody part you can think of their accelerometers.
And it's it's neat. Like I was saying, like the
the crush test dummies, the anthropomorphic test devices is what
they're called in the industry. Um, they are getting more
and more um bio fedelic like they're they're faithful to
biology is basically what that word means. Um. And so
(16:35):
you're you're finding crashed stummies. They are starting to have
like simulated internal organs and all that stuff, because I mean,
I can guess if you're in the industry, you probably
don't really want to deal with post mortem human subjects.
You would much rather have crush s st dummies that
basically replicate the same things. But we're still a long
way off from that. It's just on the horizon. They're
(16:56):
starting to work on it now. But one other thing
I saw, Chuck is they may not ever become widely
used because three D modeling is so it's so rapidly
advancing that all of this will probably in the next
fifteen years. They will do crash test still, but it
(17:19):
will be once, and it will be after running tons
of computer simulations, and then they will just do it
once in like the real world to make sure that
the computer is right. But it'll probably all become virtual
pretty soon because we're getting we're getting really good at
at modeling humans getting good at modeling traffic accidents. So
(17:40):
you put them together and you can kind of test
cars based on the parameters that you just feed and
you just make measurements on the cars and feed it
into the computer and press enter and sit back, and
you know, maybe have a Clark Bar. I was just
in uh, northern California, in San Francisco, go in Wine Country,
(18:00):
and just in San Francisco for the night. But in
that one evening walking around, I saw probably four different um,
I can't remember what it's called, but the Google self
driving car concepts, the death car driving around town. Yeah,
what's it called US? I can't remember, but I just
(18:21):
saw this car with like a big thing on the
roof with like a spinner in it. And at first
I thought it was a like maybe Google Earth or
something or street view, and uh, I looked up what
it was, and it is. It is a self driving
concept car and they had people in them driving. Obviously
at this stage I was like, wait a minute, no
(18:41):
one's in that car. But it was definitely you know,
when you walk around San Francisco, that's the testing ground
for all that kind of stuff, so it's very interesting. Um.
All right, so you got those accelerometers, you have load sensors, uh,
they're gonna measure the amount of force during a crash.
You have movement sensors um that you know, they're gonna
sense the movement of the body and everything it's doing.
(19:05):
And the really important thing within all this, and I
think we talked about this in one of the other episodes,
is these dummies are painted up and they're painted in
the different body parts are painted with different colors, and
it's it's pretty ingenious. Actually, something is an idea as
simple as that can tell you so much because when
they go to look in that car afterward and they see,
(19:27):
you know, there's red paint here and there's blue paint there,
they're gonna be like, well, how did that knee hit
that part of the car, because that's the only place
where there's blue paint is on the kneecap. I guess
we got to figure this out. And so they look
at the scuff marks and they can tell exactly what
body part hit exactly what car part. I love that too,
that we're just getting so much more advanced, but good
(19:47):
old fashioned, like you know, putting pain or chalk on
on the face to see what it hits is still
just as useful as ever. All Right, So how did
these crashes go? Oh? Well, there's a few things that
you gotta do first. Um so, the the when when
they're carrying out these crashes, the um ii h s uh.
(20:10):
The insurance Institute for Highway Safety and the National Highway
Traffic Safety Administration in the United States, those are the
two groups that carry out the most crash testing. And
they're both independent and they go buy their own cars
and they just test them and then they tell everybody
what the results are, and they have their own rating systems.
And we'll talk about all that in a minute. But
(20:31):
the i h S. One of the first things they
do is UM. They basically gout the car like they'll
put they'll take the UM well, all the vital fluids out,
I should say, they take out the anti freeze, they
take out the oil, they take out the fuel, and
then they replace it with like mineral spirits so that
it still has the same weight and everything UM because
(20:53):
it can be a pretty big mess when when you're
carrying out one of these tests and there's no reason
to get any is all over the place. You can
go look and make a pretty good estimation of what
it would have looked like just because the hose was
ripped off. You don't need to see the anti freeze
all over the floor, right, So they'll actually prep the
car to get it ready. They measure it, they weigh
it UM and they wanted to be as close to
(21:17):
like a real life situation as possible, so they'll put
different dummies UM in the car. Sometimes they fill it
out with, you know, an adult male, fifty percentile male,
fifth percentile female in the passenger UM, another fifth percent
female in the in the back UM, and then the
(21:37):
car is ready to go, they put it. They put
all sorts of cameras all over the car as well
as sensors to UM and they have all sorts of
high speed UH cameras filming the whole thing as well,
because you know, just like painting the face of the
crash test dummy is really important, you know, using your eyes,
like visually inspecting what happens. You as the human engineer,
(22:00):
seeing this with your own eyes. There's stuff that you're
gonna see that just wouldn't wouldn't be translated from the
data that the sensors are picking up on the dummies. Yeah,
and you if you're at home or driving your car
right now, and you're thinking, well, wait a minute, guys,
if they're taking all the gasoline and the oil out
of the car, how does it go forward? When they
dropped the cinder block on the accelerator and shut the
(22:22):
door really fast and jump out of the way. Um,
they're not doing that. The car doesn't have to be started,
it doesn't have to be running because the car is
on a track and it is being pulled down a runway.
And that all makes complete sense that this is operated
by Pulley and not by an actual car being started
and driven. All they need to know is that this
(22:44):
thing is going to go thirty five into that wall
or I guess in the case of the insurance group,
I think they go forty right, so they get a
little bit faster and they do different kinds of impacts
they go. You know, I think the the for many
many years, the gold standard was the head on collision,
(23:06):
and so they have built cars over the years to
withstand as best as possible that head on collision with
another car or hitting that brick wall straight on. Like
we've all seen the videos and and you think, yeah,
that's the worst of the worst. Of course, that's what
you should prepare for, but it's pretty cool. The Um,
what's the name of the insurance group in the eye,
(23:27):
the i h S the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. Yeah,
they started saying, and a lot of stuff was overhauled
in ten. They started saying things like, well, maybe the
worst crash is when two people are trying to turn
through an intersection, or your left headlight meets up with
their left head light and there's like just a bit
(23:49):
of overlap and it's not a head on collision. Like,
we're building these for a head on collisions, and what
if there are weak points at these corners and they're right,
that is a real danger. So they have found out
through these crash tests of these partial uh not layovers
what do they call them overlaps? Yeah, instead of a
full head on collision, they were learning that some of
(24:11):
those crashes can be worse, and so we need to
start testing that stuff. And like, maybe it's not a
straight t bone into the side of the car. You
think of that as the worst thing, but what if
it's forward a little bit or backward a little bit
from that point? Yeah, Or you know if if you're
doing a head on collision. It's so rare that two
cars run perfectly, yeah, like like hood ornament to hood ornament,
(24:34):
This is not how it happens. It's usually like, you know,
the front bumper of one car into the other, and
you know the car the auto industry. Car makers have
been creating these crumple zones in the front that we're
relying on, you know, that full front impact that the
crash testers were testing for so that they could meet
those standards, but they really weren't designing for the other
(24:56):
real world stuff. And so the National Highway Traffic Safety
Administration and the i h S started tested, making their
tests a little differently, and all of a sudden, the
automakers started not getting the marks that they were before,
and so they kind of were forced to scramble to
keep up, as we'll see, which is pretty great because
(25:16):
it really shows that the people who run these crash
tests and who actually do this work care about you
and your family. When you're driving around in a car.
They're not sitting on their laurels. Or they are. But
then they eventually stopped sitting on their laurels and like
rechallenge everybody again. Yeah, I think they were. They found
that a lot of those sort of um diagonal hits
(25:38):
were causing a lot of like pretty catastrophic leg injuries, right,
and so they had to kind of reconfigure things um
inside the car. And you know, modern cards are so
you know, I think I bought my first new car
of my life a few years ago when I bought
my Volvo. And um, you know, balbos are known for
(26:00):
their safety anyway, and um, these things, I mean, they
have all sort of an all. Most modern cars on
the market now have these where they're breaking automatically for
you and they're helping you stay in your lane and
all that stuff. But you know, if you do a
certain move in this car, um, your seat belt is
called pretension. They have pretension ers and the seat belt
(26:21):
that will tighten down on you right before an impact.
And I've had that thing tightened down on me before, man,
and it's a little disconcerting, Like, you know, it's for
your safety, but when you're not expecting it and you
don't get into a crash and all of a sudden,
you're like and your seat belt cranks down on you. Um.
They also have something called a forced limitter that is
going to work in hand in hand with that pretension
(26:44):
or to make sure that they you know, it doesn't
just pretension through your chest into the back seat and
so that all happens just before the air bag. It's
all timed out like by the millisecond to tighten down
that seat belt to try and keep you from going
forward at all, and then the air bag comes out,
so when you do go forward, even that'll and you know,
(27:05):
you can listen to the airbags episode for all the
detail there, but they work hand in hand to make
sure you that you're slowing that kinetic energy down as
slowly and evenly as you can. They work hand in
de gloved hand hand and grass And yeah, you could
you like seat belts that do things like that? You
like airbags? Thank crash testers who basically created who demonstrated
(27:30):
the need for that, and automakers responded because people who
buy cars like you and me said, oh, yeah, I'd
like to to live. Yeah, I think my car even
has it has a built in booster seat in the
middle for my daughter, which she's finally old enough to
ride in. And when that seat is unhooked and engage,
(27:50):
you just kind of pop a little lever and push
it into place. It's uh, the side curtain air bags
raise so because they know that the air bag will
hit the child in a in a safer way basically
because the kid is in there. It's really it's amazing,
like how much how far safety has come well inside
impact airbags. And there was another development that that came
(28:13):
out of crash testing too, was not just the existence
of side impact airbags, but you know once those were created,
they were they they came about because of the crash
testers suddenly doing like t bone testing, like side impact tests.
But now they've also realized that, um, if you hit
like the front corner of your car, like saying a
(28:35):
telephone pole, Um, it's going to spin you around. You're
gonna start rotating around the telephone pole, and you might
slide off of that front airbag coming out of your
your steering wheel. So what they and they saw that
on crash tests without a side impact right, so that
they realized they went to the automakers and said, hey,
(28:55):
you should probably have the side impact curtains come down
when there's this front bumper impact to like on a
telephone poll, because people are going to slide off and
you want the side impact or bag to be there
as well. Yeah, and then the stressed out engineer says, well,
maybe the whole car should just be one giant airbag.
Would that make you happy? Get out of here. That
(29:19):
was a great stressed out engineer impression. And then the
uh the people say, yeah, actually, that's not a bad
idea to put him everywhere. Who was that? Was it?
Dennis Leary? What that was? A stand up comedian who's like,
won't they should just all beside? They should all just
be really I think so, Well, that just shows how
(29:40):
easy it can be to steal a bit. Yeah accidentally, right, yea,
you owe Dennis Leary five dollars? All right, I'll pay
him right after this ad break. Okay, well, now we're
on the road, driving in your truck. Want to learn
a thing or two from Josh Chuck stuff you should know?
(30:02):
All right? Okay, so we never really said what happens
in the in the crash test. Um. There's a few
(30:24):
different ones that are carried out, depending on whether you're
hanging around the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's crash testing
site or the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety's crash test site,
but they're very similar. Um. A lot of people look
to the i h S is maybe being the gold
standard and the Safety Administration is being more government bureaucracy,
(30:50):
but they're both doing pretty good work. If you, um,
both of them really rely on the front crash because
those happen a lot, and when they do happen, they
can have pretty serious consequences for the passengers of the car.
So the Traffic Safety Administration they do they do one
(31:10):
UM and there is a full impact where they drag
the car at thirty five hour into a concrete barrier
and the whole, the whole hood, the whole front bumper
is involved in the impact the i h S And
this is one reason why they're kind of looked at
ISS maybe being a little better. Um. They they do
parts where the front bumper only a percentage is used,
(31:33):
and they do two different crash tests. They do one
where of the front bumper so it would be like
left headlight to left headlight kind of crash head on collision.
And then they do another one that's that involves more
of the bumper and UM one of them. Well yeah,
and I think the Traffic Safety Administration does those as well.
Now right, Okay, so they got on board. Yeah, finally
(31:56):
they said, okay, we really need to kind of consider
this because will do run into um, a pole, a
telephone pole once in a while. Like they're these these
groups are trying to recreate real world scenarios as much
as possible to see how cars hold up, you know. Yeah,
and again to reiterate, the I I h S does
an extra five miles per hour forty as opposed to
(32:19):
thirty five. UM. There is an injury classification system, UH
that's used from one to six, one being minor cuts
and bruises all the way up to fatal. And that
is not the star rating. That's just totally dealing with
the kind of injuries that somebody may like the likelihood
of what kind of injuries is what they're trying to
(32:41):
measure at least. Yeah, there was a group called the
UM American or no, the Association for Advancement of Automotive
Medicine that came up with that scale, the abbreviated Injury scale,
and there is a lot that goes into it, and
they were kind enough to basically create a handbook that
they shared with these car testers and car makers UM
(33:04):
so that they could they could take this data and
translate it into injuries so they could say, like, oh, well,
the crash test dummy had a load of you know,
five million Newton's on what would be the femur, and
so the femur would have just snapped in eight pieces
so that would be this number, and so that that
(33:25):
abbreviated Injuries Report UM is taken into account and translated
further into the rating systems because the National Highway Traffic
Safety Administration basically looks at how the car holds up
in producing injuries, and then the i h S looks
at how the car holds up and crashes as far
(33:45):
as injuries goes. And then also the other UM, the
other occupant um safety stuff too, like like the seatbelts,
the airbags, all of that stuff, right, And you mentioned
in is when things and it's it's kind of horrifying
to think of they were doing good work up until.
It's not like it was it's willy nilly or anything.
(34:07):
But when you look at all the changes they've made since,
you're kind of like, man, it took that long to
start considering some of this stuff because it still seems
a little behind the curve even with the updates. Yeah,
as far as body types and all that stuff, for sure. Um,
So they change things in the new star ratings came
out in eleven, and cars that were previously getting four
(34:31):
and five star ratings in every category, in all of
a sudden, we're getting like three stars maybe or maybe
even two stars under the new system. And that's because
they have these new injury parameters. They're adding these different
tests now, um they're using the different size dummies. They're
now using that again, that small adult female instead of
(34:53):
the five ten one seventy email. Who if I ever
weigh literally a hundred, because I'm about five ten. If
ever weigh a hundreds eventy on the nose, I don't
know that. I'm either going to try and gain five
or lose five. I don't want to be one seventy
on the nose. Okay, you don't want to be median.
I get that. I don't want to, And hey, I'm
doing a great job so far, nowhere close to right.
(35:15):
You're just playing it safe. Yeah yeah, But if I
go in some massive weight loss campaign, I'm gonna I'm
gonna stop at like one eighty and be like I
like a little chunk around the middle. That's what I'm
going for is one eight as well? Maybe yeah that's
a good way. But you're you're like six ft though, right,
I am five ft eleven and a half. It just
irks me and getting smaller, yeah, just like the average
(35:37):
mail yep, you'll be five ten one day, my friend.
Do you think so? Now? Probably not that short. But
I used to be a solid five tin and now
I'm like five note and a half. What happens? What
are you're just getting compressed? I don't know. I think
that's a good uh. I mean you shrink as you
get older. That's a good shorty, I think, Okay, why
do you shrink? I don't know. We'll have to find
(35:57):
out and tell everybody. Uh. Some of the other key
parts of the post is uh. The NHTSA started assigning
a single overall safety score from front side and rollover,
with front having the heaviest weight of that overall score.
They started started putting in these additional measures for uh,
(36:20):
for neck extension, chest deflection, and femur and I think
they didn't have that before, which is kind of horrifying. Uh.
What else? I think they added the poll test? Yeah,
running into polls. It's a big one too. One of
the things that they did that really change things is
that rather than just getting an absolute score based on
(36:41):
their criteria, they started pitting cars against one another. Two.
Oh yeah, that's a that's a huge one. That was
an enormous change because now they're like, okay, you want
to be the best, well you've got to be the
best in the industry. You can't just be like, you know, yes,
we're all going to meet this. And that was one
reason why those two thousand ten changes were aid and
one reason why the i h S keeps changing its tests.
(37:04):
They're not like like any time they they they create
a new test or they create a new standard, all
of the automakers rushed to meet that UM and some
of them may already meet it or come close. They
won't have to do too much to meet those higher
standards because they're already over designing beyond what were the
requirements before. But the rest of the industry, if you
(37:26):
don't know by now, just from like our Pinto episode alone,
the auto industry is really lazy sometimes when it comes
to overdesigning UM. They will sometimes meet minimum requirements even
when they're exceeding minimum requirements. And this is a good
example of that because with the n h T S A,
when they're doing crash tests, they're basically just doing it
(37:46):
for fun. This is again not this is not law.
Like you can get a one star rating from the
n h T A T S A and you're fine,
like it just looks bad to your consumer. But the
fact that it looks bad you're consumed humor means that
the automaker will scramble to try to get that five
star rating. But then they'll they'll hack it, they'll figure
(38:07):
it out, Like all we have to do is focus
on the whole front crumple zone. We don't have to
worry about the driver's side of the passenger side of
the bumper. We just have to worry about the whole
front because that's what the n h T s A
does when they're doing tests, and if we can meet
that standard, we'll get that five stars. Well, when the
n h T s A and the i h S
change their standards all of a sudden, the industry has
(38:29):
to scramble to catch up to become like that gold standard.
And they do it again and again and again to
keep safety getting better and better and better, and then
also finding new things that had been overlooked before to
make those parts of cars safer as well, which is
pretty cool. I mean, like this is again, this is superfectly.
None of this is mandated. It's not mandatory. No one,
(38:51):
no car maker has to cement us. They actually don't
even have a choice because these agencies are going and
buying their own cars and crashing them. And there's nothing
legal about that, um, but they just the fact that
somebody's out there doing this, I think is just such
a great It's just a great example of people caring
about other people. Yeah, and you know, it's gotten to
(39:12):
the point where if you have a newer car with
the air bags and such and safety standards and you
and you wear your seat belt. Um, there are outliers,
of course, with just these horrific car wrecks that do happen.
But if you're just talking about a standard, even bad
car crash, you are gonna fare pretty well these days
(39:35):
thanks to the work that all these people have done
over the years. Um, again, there are outliers, but uh,
they have made cars really, really incredibly safe. Um to
get into what I would just describe as sort of
a normal car wreck and not a fender bender, like
you know, a carrect that even might look pretty gnarly,
and you see him on the road, you know, you
(39:57):
see two cars You're like, oh my gosh, and you
see people standing outside like giving the officer there you know,
the account of what happened, and you're just like, man,
there it is right there, Like those people are are
standing there talking to somebody, whereas you know, two decades
ago they were probably you know, maybe not even alive.
Which is just a testament to all the work they've done.
(40:19):
Um one way, they really need to ramp it up.
And I couldn't tell if they are actually even doing
this testing yet, but some of that stuff you sent
pointed out says that like there's still sort of crashing
similar cars into one another. Oh yeah, that's a big one,
and that's a big deal these days when you've got
these you know what happens when a suburban crashes into
(40:42):
a Honda Civic. Um, these are two very much mismatched cars,
not just in overall size, but bumper height is a
big deal, and these bumpers are made to hit one
another and then operate accordingly from there. If a bumper
is going over the other bumper, uh, we often happens
in these cases of a big suv or a big
(41:02):
truck compared to a smaller car. Uh. That this is
where you're going to see a lot of like kind
of bad injuries happening. And I don't know if they're
actually testing for that, if they're just talking about, like, hey,
what do we need to do to test the stuff
right exactly? UM. I don't know if they are yet either,
but they seem to be on the precipice, if not
another one. Um. Another criticism I've seen of both groups
(41:24):
is that they're they're testing these at thirty five miles
an hour forty miles an hour. Everybody's like, well, I'll
drive a heck of a lot faster than forty miles
an hour. What would my car doing sixty, you know,
or seventy or eighty something like that. Um, And that's
a that is a big criticism. The both agencies pushed
back and say, this is this is where most of
the accidents happen. I'm sure they're basing that in statistics,
(41:48):
and I would probably tend to say, okay, yes, but
what about the you know, maybe that's fifty one percent,
but what about the fort that is, you know, much
faster than that. And I think if they did start
crash testing at higher speeds, cars would be showing to
be kind of pitiful and in handling that, and maybe
automakers would start to scramble to catch up to that too. Well, yeah,
(42:11):
because they're kind of working on the assumption, which may
be correct, that most of these wrecks are happening in
like neighborhoods and not necessarily on the expressway. But what
about the guy who's driving sixty through the neighborhood. You know,
they're they're saying like this, this is assuming people are
driving the speed limit, which is not the case. And
(42:32):
we have a street very near my house that is, uh,
you know, it's not a highway, but people drive like
it's a highway because it's really long and straight and
sort of runs between all these residential neighborhood streets, and
you know, people go sixty seventy. It's just ridiculously. No, dude,
I've extra this like point where I've turned into an old,
(42:53):
middle aged and screamed, too fast in your neighborhood. Hellow
down somebody driving too asked it's it's man, and it
is very like I can't, I can't help it. I
can't not do it. Yeah, And I live um near
an intersection, and there's a curve in my street before
the intersection, so people will come around the curve and
(43:13):
if they see the lightest green, they will just hammer
it to try and make that light, and like all
of a sudden they're going like literally like fifty miles
in front of my house, and I just, man, it
makes me so mad. Yeah, I'm with you. It's so
angry about that stuff. There's just no point because well
it's because it's you know, you know the deal. Sure,
people driving that fast to save what ends up being
(43:36):
thirty seconds to the stoplight. It's just when you outweigh
risks and what you're gaining, Like, even if you think
you're in a hurry, you're really not. In the end
getting there that much quicker, like a minute or two
isn't that big of a difference. And it's just it's
unnerming that people take that kind of risk just to
make a light. Nice. Nice, don't do it people. That's
my soapbox moment. Yeah, I think you just stay up
(43:58):
there on that soapbox, buddy. That is a big one.
Can I come down to P No, you've made your bed,
now you have to stand in it. P in it?
You got anything else? I got nothing else. I got
one more thing. One of the reasons why I also
love the I h S is the highest possible rating
you could get from them is just good, yeah, poor,
(44:21):
marginal acceptable, and then good? How do we do good? Nothing?
Nothing better, no exclamation points, no comfetti. Uh. Well, since
Chuck and I both said good, that means, of course,
everybody's time for a listener mail. Uh. This is from
our Trepid Nation episode, which just dropped today in real time.
(44:44):
Hey guys, I was listening to the episode on tree panning,
and I feel like I am such adult. I literally
had never thought of craniotomies? Is the modern version of
uh tree penning? Treppening? What did we end up with
tree panning? I don't know. Trip tree painting doesn't sound
familiar trip panning, even though I knew about the ancient practice.
(45:06):
This is really funny because I had a craniotomy. I
have a Chiari malformation syndrome. I have kilary. I think
it's c H I a r I, and I bet
you it's not Ri. You gotta say it like an
Italian person. Chi malformation syndrome, and part of decompression surgery
(45:28):
was a crany craniotomy. This totally computes with the idea
of ancient people using trip panning to relieve chronic headaches.
Since one of Ki's main symptoms is terrible, terrible, constant headaches.
Something else you said in the episode helped me make
sense of something my neurosurgeon said too. When discussing the
diagnosis and what the decompression surgery would achieve, he briefly
(45:48):
said that some people think of surgery actually can help
cure depression, even though there's no evidence. I had never
heard of that and certainly wasn't looking for that for
that case. Myself just wanted to stop falling over. But
you mentioned in the episode that there were a lot
of internet rumors that trepanning can help with depression, So
now I know why he said that. Anyway, there's a
fun I've said listen to and kind of see myself in.
(46:11):
So thanks for that. Keep up the good stuff that
is from Amanda. Awesome, Amanda. I'm really glad we could
kind of connect the pieces for you. Yeah, and I
hope you're doing well. Yeah, me too. I hope you're
not following over any longer and you don't have headaches. Agreed.
If you want to get in touch with us, like
Amanda did, then you can send us an email to
Stuff Podcast at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff You Should
(46:38):
Know is a production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts
my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of I
Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh,
and there's Chuck and there's Jerry over there, and this
is stuff you should know the podcast. All right, we've
done one on air bags, right, Which one did we
(00:25):
do that was all about like the crumple zones and
all that stuff. That's a great question, Chuck. I've been
really trying to figure that out. I think it must
have been Pinto's what was it. I know that we
talked a lot about car safety and engineering and how
I don't know, Man, I don't know. I'm suddenly creeped out.
(00:48):
Are you confident we have not done this one? I
would put my confidence at I searched so far and wide,
all right, which is we've three that is well above
the fifty threshold that we required to possibly rerecording. Like,
none of this, none of this seemed particularly familiar. We've
(01:10):
definitely talked about something like crumple zones, that kind of thing,
because we've talked about how cars we like I used
to think they were pieces of junk now, but they're
actually designed to come apart like that because in doing so,
they protect the people inside. We've definitely talked about that,
but and that really applies to what we're about to
(01:32):
talk about. But the actual details of what we're about
to talk about, I don't recognize them as familiar. Alright,
forward forward we go. So so cars have become exponentially
safer than they used to be. UM. There's, first of all,
hats off to not only the house stuff Works article
were working from UM, but also a Consumer Reports article
(01:53):
on crash testing that was really great, and then one
from Jelopnick that was a really great one about crash
testing your are And on that Gelopnic article, that's a
great website. It is, it's wonderful. UM. On that Gelopnic article,
they posted a YouTube video that made the rounds like
a few years back, UM, and it's a it's a
(02:13):
two thousand nine Malibu versus a nine bel Air and
they go head on and the the dummy and the
Malibu is like what, I didn't even notice anything, and
the person in the bell Air just disintegrates. Basically, the
crash test dummy and the bell are just disintegrates. Because
cars used to be made too to be sturdy. But
(02:36):
that's really bad for you in the car nowadays, they're
made to not be sturdy, and that moves the force
and the energy of the impact around the car and
not into you. And the reason why cars are so
much better these days now is because we started crash
testing them, and the people who test them, who crash
test them, started telling the public, Hey, this car doesn't
(02:59):
due very well in a crash test. Uh, this car
does really great in a crash test. And people started
to kind of sit up and listen and go, oh, wait,
we can survive a crash now if we buy a
certain car. Let's go buy that car. And then automakers
started to try to keep up and catch up, and
safety became an important thing. And again it was almost
exclusively thanks to crash testing. Yeah, car maker said, I
(03:22):
guess we all got to start making things go again
to nanny state. All right, So let's go back a
little bit. We'll talk very briefly about the history of
crash testing, because, like you said, in the early days,
it was basically, if a car performed well out there
on the road, um, then great, that's kind of we
(03:44):
care about driving the car, not crashing the car. Why
would anyone care about that? And then in nineteen thirty four,
General Motors said, you know what, maybe we should crash
a car because it turns out that you can die
when you crash these things, so maybe we should look
into this. So GM held the very first barrier test
(04:04):
at Milford Proving Ground in Michigan in n with an
unoccupied vehicle, and they would do this in different ways.
Sometimes they would like cartoon style, actually in both cases
cartoon style, just like release the emergency brake and give
it a push down the hill. Or they would say, hey, driver,
get in there, and as you approach that brick wall,
(04:25):
um jump out. And they said, okay, I guess that's fine. Um,
how much are you gonna pay me for that? I
don't worry about that, don't you a prisoner from a
chain gang? Nothing? Right? So uh, these early tests, again,
they weren't too protect people. They were just to try
and make sure the car could hold up a little better.
(04:47):
And so other car companies, as they started building cars,
started doing this. They didn't have proving grounds necessarily, so
sometimes they would even do this on public roads, which
was nuts. Uh. And then a ninth fifty two, a
man named Sam Alderson really changed the game when he
founded Alderson Research Laboratories, which would later on become something
(05:11):
you may have heard of called human eddics. Uh. They
were doing they won the very first contract to create
anthropomorphic dummies for testing airplanes and spacecraft, like ejection seats,
that kind of thing. And then eventually they said they
were using like sandbags and stuff like that, and eventually
they said, hey, wait a minute, you could do this
(05:31):
in cars too. So he got together with Sierra Engineering,
the Sierra Engineering Company, and created the very first crash
test dummy, Sierra Sam. Oh, that's right. We talked about
Sierra Sam in the Murphy's Law episode. Okay, maybe it's
just a bunch of stuff cobbled together. It makes me
think we did this one possible, But Sierra Sam came along.
(05:54):
They applied all these concepts to automotive testing. And Sam
Alderson is sort of a legend now. He side at
the age of ninety and two thousand five and was
posthumously inducted into the National Inventor's Halma Fame. In with
a lot of inventions, but largely this crash testumy patent
did one was the big one. Yeah, so was that
(06:16):
the one that was called the high hybrid three um
the Hybrid three and this is still human edics by
the way, that makes these Yeah, they're they're like the Yeah,
they're like as good as it gets with crash test dummy, create,
design and creation. Yeah, was when the hybrid three was
first developed, and then I think they upgraded it in
(06:36):
ninety one to take seatbelts into consideration, and then in
ninety seven to take air bags into consideration. And now
the standard and we'll get to why they did this,
is the H three five F meaning fifth female. So
the fifth, fifth percentile size wise female is the standard
(07:00):
me that's used. Now, that's great, and that's a huge,
huge progression because for decades and decades they used what
was known as the fiftieth percentile male dummy, which which
was yeah, five ft ten inches, hundred and seventy pounds.
And he was introduced from what I saw in nineteen
(07:22):
seventies six, at a time when the average male in
the United States was five ten hundred and seventy pounds. Well,
the average male in the United States has not been
five seventy pounds for a really long time. They the
average males gained about twenty five pounds and shrunken inch
since then, that's the average male in the United States now.
(07:45):
But the problem is is like these crash testers were
still using that that um fiftie percentile male male dummy
even though it didn't apply. And that's not to say
anything about child dummies, female dummies. Um they were. It
was basically like you know how when they test a
new drug, they tested on the healthiest, least vulnerable population
(08:07):
and then say it works. That's exactly what the history
of crash testing has done. Uh. And but only in
the last I don't know, probably ten ten years or
so have they really been like, no, we really need
to expand the types of dummies that we're using. So
they're coming up with they're using female dummies more frequently,
child dummies more frequently, obese dummies because apparently an obese
(08:30):
person is about seventy percent likelier to die in a
car accident than a non obese person. So they're now
creating obese dummies to get a better idea of just
how safe these actually are and as close to a
real world application as possible. Yeah, And I mean the
way I read this is at some point they said, well,
(08:51):
we need to make these safe for all drivers, So
what's the most vulnerable driver probably and they all said, well,
I guess a sixteen year old girl m is, you know,
statistically most likely to be probably the smallest version of
these dummies. So that's what they went with. They went
with the fifth percentile UH female hybrid three. And I
(09:14):
guess the reckoning is if it can be safe for them,
then it can be safe for that dumb, average male.
It's pretty great. Yeah, there's but it's still not required.
There's actually a representative, a congresswoman from d C named
Eleanor Holmes Norton, who just this past June introduced a
bill that would require UM crash testers to also use
(09:36):
UM female dummies too. So right now it's not it's
not range. Of course they should use. Range is just
sensible and so that you know, the people who do
crash testing are aware of this and they're starting to.
But there's one other thing I saw about crash test dummies. UM.
One of the things they can't replicate is tissue damage,
but even real damage like when when you do crash tests.
(09:59):
We'll talk to about a little more detail in a second,
but UM, when you use a dummy for that kind
of thing, they're outfitted with loads of different kinds of sensors,
hundreds of sensors, recording all this amazing data, and then
they take that data and they they basically turned it
into a statistical likelihood that that amount of force, that
(10:20):
amount of acceleration um, that amount of g's suddenly pressing
on your chest would cause an injury or not. That's
what crash test dummies do for us. But they don't
actually replicate like tissue damage or your leg falling off
or anything like that um because they're made to be
used over and over and over again so that they
(10:41):
could be subjected to the kinds of stuff that would
just destroy human body. So some crash testing chuck chuck.
Some crash testing uses post mortem human subjects. I wondered
if that's where this is going. A lot of post
mortem human subjects, some of them embalmed, which we failed
to mention in our embalming episode, some fresh. They call
(11:04):
them fresh because an embalmed one is just not going
to replicate the kind of yuck sure that a fresh
one well. And so that's a huge part of crash testing,
from what I can tell, is using post mortem human
subjects as well. Wow, that's amazing um. And we should
also point out maybe we'll take a break, but before
(11:25):
we take one, we should point out that this that
car companies do all kinds of internal crash testing before
they get to the regulatory crash testing because you don't
want to you don't want to fail those, So they
they'll crash eighty two d new vehicles in a line
before they even get to their regulatory bodies to do
(11:46):
their official crashes. And what we're mainly talking about is
those official crashes, but I imagine they're all pretty similar.
Now we should also say those official crashes there, they're
not even necessarily official. Basically, the NASH No Highway trans
Traffic Safety Administration has a bunch of guidelines, some of
them involving crashes, and then they basically say, these are
(12:08):
the guidelines. You met you you car makers better meet them,
but they don't go and actually like test the cars
for that. The crashing that they're doing is beyond the
minimum the law requires, so nobody's actually testing the the
auto makers cars to to see that they meet the
minimum requirements. It's just the threat of basically being sued
(12:32):
into oblivion for not meeting those minimum standards is um
is what keeps the car makers honest. And then that
and then one other thing I saw from that Jelopnick
article is the minimum legal standards that a car can
be put out on an American road are so low
that they they so vastly, like like under under meat, undersatisfy. Yes,
(13:02):
thank you, Charles, They so vastly undersatisfy what the average
American would be willing to get in and drive. That
just you know what Americans want to drive as far
as safety is concerned. Is one of is that that's
what carmakers are meeting, not just the minimum legal requirements.
So interesting, you're probably your car is probably going to
(13:22):
exceed those minimum legal requirements. You don't really have to
worry about that in the United States, right, and then
we'll talk about this at the end. Their tests completely
separate that done by the Insurance Institute for How We
Safety that are even more different, more robusts. Great set up,
my friend, Chuck, Great set up to you, my friend.
(13:44):
Can we just stop now or do we have to
come back? We probably already did this episode anyway, so
we can just stop, all right, Well we'll be back
right after this anyway. Well, now we're on the road
driving in your truck. Want to learn a thing or
two from Josh Chuck, you should know all right, all right,
(14:22):
so we laid the groundwork here. We know they're crashing
some cars a lot, all in the name of making
things safe for us. But we know that they're not saying, uh,
they're not like it's not like GM says, all right,
here's here's the car. Go tell us if it's okay.
It's it's a voluntary thing sort of um like good
luck selling cars if you don't. But sure it's voluntary.
(14:46):
And they're loaded with seven with sensors. Like you said,
they're accelerometers, h and accelerometers are going to measure acceleration
in a particular direction. They used this obviously to determine
if you might get injured. Um. Acceleration is the rate
at which speed changes. So if you're driving a car
(15:07):
and uh, you let's say there were no air bags
back in the day and no seat belts and your
head hits that windshield, the acceleration from your head flying
forward to hitting uh not zero because it's going to
go through the windshield. Um, but it's gonna decrease really
really fast, and that that rate of acceleration change is
(15:27):
the danger, and making car safe is all about softening
that and lessening that kinetic energy of your body and
that car's energy going from whatever speed it's going through
to zero. Yeah, because yeah, you and the car are
both traveling the same speed and you you both have
to stop pretty quickly. Um, you want to cut down
(15:50):
in the car transferring it's kinetic energy to you, and
then you want to cut down on your kinetic energy. Like,
if you're gonna have to transfer your kinetic energy is something,
let it be like an air bag or something like that,
rather than the dashboard. Right. So that's why they have
these accelerometers all over the place. They're in your head,
they're in the chest, they're in the pelvis, they're in
(16:12):
kind of everybody part you can think of their accelerometers.
And it's it's neat. Like I was saying, like the
the crush test dummies, the anthropomorphic test devices is what
they're called in the industry. Um, they are getting more
and more um bio fedelic like they're they're faithful to
biology is basically what that word means. Um. And so
(16:35):
you're you're finding crashed stummies. They are starting to have
like simulated internal organs and all that stuff, because I mean,
I can guess if you're in the industry, you probably
don't really want to deal with post mortem human subjects.
You would much rather have crush s st dummies that
basically replicate the same things. But we're still a long
way off from that. It's just on the horizon. They're
(16:56):
starting to work on it now. But one other thing
I saw, Chuck is they may not ever become widely
used because three D modeling is so it's so rapidly
advancing that all of this will probably in the next
fifteen years. They will do crash test still, but it
(17:19):
will be once, and it will be after running tons
of computer simulations, and then they will just do it
once in like the real world to make sure that
the computer is right. But it'll probably all become virtual
pretty soon because we're getting we're getting really good at
at modeling humans getting good at modeling traffic accidents. So
(17:40):
you put them together and you can kind of test
cars based on the parameters that you just feed and
you just make measurements on the cars and feed it
into the computer and press enter and sit back, and
you know, maybe have a Clark Bar. I was just
in uh, northern California, in San Francisco, go in Wine Country,
(18:00):
and just in San Francisco for the night. But in
that one evening walking around, I saw probably four different um,
I can't remember what it's called, but the Google self
driving car concepts, the death car driving around town. Yeah,
what's it called US? I can't remember, but I just
(18:21):
saw this car with like a big thing on the
roof with like a spinner in it. And at first
I thought it was a like maybe Google Earth or
something or street view, and uh, I looked up what
it was, and it is. It is a self driving
concept car and they had people in them driving. Obviously
at this stage I was like, wait a minute, no
(18:41):
one's in that car. But it was definitely you know,
when you walk around San Francisco, that's the testing ground
for all that kind of stuff, so it's very interesting. Um.
All right, so you got those accelerometers, you have load sensors, uh,
they're gonna measure the amount of force during a crash.
You have movement sensors um that you know, they're gonna
sense the movement of the body and everything it's doing.
(19:05):
And the really important thing within all this, and I
think we talked about this in one of the other episodes,
is these dummies are painted up and they're painted in
the different body parts are painted with different colors, and
it's it's pretty ingenious. Actually, something is an idea as
simple as that can tell you so much because when
they go to look in that car afterward and they see,
(19:27):
you know, there's red paint here and there's blue paint there,
they're gonna be like, well, how did that knee hit
that part of the car, because that's the only place
where there's blue paint is on the kneecap. I guess
we got to figure this out. And so they look
at the scuff marks and they can tell exactly what
body part hit exactly what car part. I love that too,
that we're just getting so much more advanced, but good
(19:47):
old fashioned, like you know, putting pain or chalk on
on the face to see what it hits is still
just as useful as ever. All Right, So how did
these crashes go? Oh? Well, there's a few things that
you gotta do first. Um so, the the when when
they're carrying out these crashes, the um ii h s uh.
(20:10):
The insurance Institute for Highway Safety and the National Highway
Traffic Safety Administration in the United States, those are the
two groups that carry out the most crash testing. And
they're both independent and they go buy their own cars
and they just test them and then they tell everybody
what the results are, and they have their own rating systems.
And we'll talk about all that in a minute. But
(20:31):
the i h S. One of the first things they
do is UM. They basically gout the car like they'll
put they'll take the UM well, all the vital fluids out,
I should say, they take out the anti freeze, they
take out the oil, they take out the fuel, and
then they replace it with like mineral spirits so that
it still has the same weight and everything UM because
(20:53):
it can be a pretty big mess when when you're
carrying out one of these tests and there's no reason
to get any is all over the place. You can
go look and make a pretty good estimation of what
it would have looked like just because the hose was
ripped off. You don't need to see the anti freeze
all over the floor, right, So they'll actually prep the
car to get it ready. They measure it, they weigh
it UM and they wanted to be as close to
(21:17):
like a real life situation as possible, so they'll put
different dummies UM in the car. Sometimes they fill it
out with, you know, an adult male, fifty percentile male,
fifth percentile female in the passenger UM, another fifth percent
female in the in the back UM, and then the
(21:37):
car is ready to go, they put it. They put
all sorts of cameras all over the car as well
as sensors to UM and they have all sorts of
high speed UH cameras filming the whole thing as well,
because you know, just like painting the face of the
crash test dummy is really important, you know, using your eyes,
like visually inspecting what happens. You as the human engineer,
(22:00):
seeing this with your own eyes. There's stuff that you're
gonna see that just wouldn't wouldn't be translated from the
data that the sensors are picking up on the dummies. Yeah,
and you if you're at home or driving your car
right now, and you're thinking, well, wait a minute, guys,
if they're taking all the gasoline and the oil out
of the car, how does it go forward? When they
dropped the cinder block on the accelerator and shut the
(22:22):
door really fast and jump out of the way. Um,
they're not doing that. The car doesn't have to be started,
it doesn't have to be running because the car is
on a track and it is being pulled down a runway.
And that all makes complete sense that this is operated
by Pulley and not by an actual car being started
and driven. All they need to know is that this
(22:44):
thing is going to go thirty five into that wall
or I guess in the case of the insurance group,
I think they go forty right, so they get a
little bit faster and they do different kinds of impacts
they go. You know, I think the the for many
many years, the gold standard was the head on collision,
(23:06):
and so they have built cars over the years to
withstand as best as possible that head on collision with
another car or hitting that brick wall straight on. Like
we've all seen the videos and and you think, yeah,
that's the worst of the worst. Of course, that's what
you should prepare for, but it's pretty cool. The Um,
what's the name of the insurance group in the eye,
(23:27):
the i h S the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. Yeah,
they started saying, and a lot of stuff was overhauled
in ten. They started saying things like, well, maybe the
worst crash is when two people are trying to turn
through an intersection, or your left headlight meets up with
their left head light and there's like just a bit
(23:49):
of overlap and it's not a head on collision. Like,
we're building these for a head on collisions, and what
if there are weak points at these corners and they're right,
that is a real danger. So they have found out
through these crash tests of these partial uh not layovers
what do they call them overlaps? Yeah, instead of a
full head on collision, they were learning that some of
(24:11):
those crashes can be worse, and so we need to
start testing that stuff. And like, maybe it's not a
straight t bone into the side of the car. You
think of that as the worst thing, but what if
it's forward a little bit or backward a little bit
from that point? Yeah, Or you know if if you're
doing a head on collision. It's so rare that two
cars run perfectly, yeah, like like hood ornament to hood ornament,
(24:34):
This is not how it happens. It's usually like, you know,
the front bumper of one car into the other, and
you know the car the auto industry. Car makers have
been creating these crumple zones in the front that we're
relying on, you know, that full front impact that the
crash testers were testing for so that they could meet
those standards, but they really weren't designing for the other
(24:56):
real world stuff. And so the National Highway Traffic Safety
Administration and the i h S started tested, making their
tests a little differently, and all of a sudden, the
automakers started not getting the marks that they were before,
and so they kind of were forced to scramble to
keep up, as we'll see, which is pretty great because
(25:16):
it really shows that the people who run these crash
tests and who actually do this work care about you
and your family. When you're driving around in a car.
They're not sitting on their laurels. Or they are. But
then they eventually stopped sitting on their laurels and like
rechallenge everybody again. Yeah, I think they were. They found
that a lot of those sort of um diagonal hits
(25:38):
were causing a lot of like pretty catastrophic leg injuries, right,
and so they had to kind of reconfigure things um
inside the car. And you know, modern cards are so
you know, I think I bought my first new car
of my life a few years ago when I bought
my Volvo. And um, you know, balbos are known for
(26:00):
their safety anyway, and um, these things, I mean, they
have all sort of an all. Most modern cars on
the market now have these where they're breaking automatically for
you and they're helping you stay in your lane and
all that stuff. But you know, if you do a
certain move in this car, um, your seat belt is
called pretension. They have pretension ers and the seat belt
(26:21):
that will tighten down on you right before an impact.
And I've had that thing tightened down on me before, man,
and it's a little disconcerting, Like, you know, it's for
your safety, but when you're not expecting it and you
don't get into a crash and all of a sudden,
you're like and your seat belt cranks down on you. Um.
They also have something called a forced limitter that is
going to work in hand in hand with that pretension
(26:44):
or to make sure that they you know, it doesn't
just pretension through your chest into the back seat and
so that all happens just before the air bag. It's
all timed out like by the millisecond to tighten down
that seat belt to try and keep you from going
forward at all, and then the air bag comes out,
so when you do go forward, even that'll and you know,
(27:05):
you can listen to the airbags episode for all the
detail there, but they work hand in hand to make
sure you that you're slowing that kinetic energy down as
slowly and evenly as you can. They work hand in
de gloved hand hand and grass And yeah, you could
you like seat belts that do things like that? You
like airbags? Thank crash testers who basically created who demonstrated
(27:30):
the need for that, and automakers responded because people who
buy cars like you and me said, oh, yeah, I'd
like to to live. Yeah, I think my car even
has it has a built in booster seat in the
middle for my daughter, which she's finally old enough to
ride in. And when that seat is unhooked and engage,
(27:50):
you just kind of pop a little lever and push
it into place. It's uh, the side curtain air bags
raise so because they know that the air bag will
hit the child in a in a safer way basically
because the kid is in there. It's really it's amazing,
like how much how far safety has come well inside
impact airbags. And there was another development that that came
(28:13):
out of crash testing too, was not just the existence
of side impact airbags, but you know once those were created,
they were they they came about because of the crash
testers suddenly doing like t bone testing, like side impact tests.
But now they've also realized that, um, if you hit
like the front corner of your car, like saying a
(28:35):
telephone pole, Um, it's going to spin you around. You're
gonna start rotating around the telephone pole, and you might
slide off of that front airbag coming out of your
your steering wheel. So what they and they saw that
on crash tests without a side impact right, so that
they realized they went to the automakers and said, hey,
(28:55):
you should probably have the side impact curtains come down
when there's this front bumper impact to like on a
telephone poll, because people are going to slide off and
you want the side impact or bag to be there
as well. Yeah, and then the stressed out engineer says, well,
maybe the whole car should just be one giant airbag.
Would that make you happy? Get out of here. That
(29:19):
was a great stressed out engineer impression. And then the
uh the people say, yeah, actually, that's not a bad
idea to put him everywhere. Who was that? Was it?
Dennis Leary? What that was? A stand up comedian who's like,
won't they should just all beside? They should all just
be really I think so, Well, that just shows how
(29:40):
easy it can be to steal a bit. Yeah accidentally, right, yea,
you owe Dennis Leary five dollars? All right, I'll pay
him right after this ad break. Okay, well, now we're
on the road, driving in your truck. Want to learn
a thing or two from Josh Chuck stuff you should know?
(30:02):
All right? Okay, so we never really said what happens
in the in the crash test. Um. There's a few
(30:24):
different ones that are carried out, depending on whether you're
hanging around the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's crash testing
site or the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety's crash test site,
but they're very similar. Um. A lot of people look
to the i h S is maybe being the gold
standard and the Safety Administration is being more government bureaucracy,
(30:50):
but they're both doing pretty good work. If you, um,
both of them really rely on the front crash because
those happen a lot, and when they do happen, they
can have pretty serious consequences for the passengers of the car.
So the Traffic Safety Administration they do they do one
(31:10):
UM and there is a full impact where they drag
the car at thirty five hour into a concrete barrier
and the whole, the whole hood, the whole front bumper
is involved in the impact the i h S And
this is one reason why they're kind of looked at
ISS maybe being a little better. Um. They they do
parts where the front bumper only a percentage is used,
(31:33):
and they do two different crash tests. They do one
where of the front bumper so it would be like
left headlight to left headlight kind of crash head on collision.
And then they do another one that's that involves more
of the bumper and UM one of them. Well yeah,
and I think the Traffic Safety Administration does those as well.
Now right, Okay, so they got on board. Yeah, finally
(31:56):
they said, okay, we really need to kind of consider
this because will do run into um, a pole, a
telephone pole once in a while. Like they're these these
groups are trying to recreate real world scenarios as much
as possible to see how cars hold up, you know. Yeah,
and again to reiterate, the I I h S does
an extra five miles per hour forty as opposed to
(32:19):
thirty five. UM. There is an injury classification system, UH
that's used from one to six, one being minor cuts
and bruises all the way up to fatal. And that
is not the star rating. That's just totally dealing with
the kind of injuries that somebody may like the likelihood
of what kind of injuries is what they're trying to
(32:41):
measure at least. Yeah, there was a group called the
UM American or no, the Association for Advancement of Automotive
Medicine that came up with that scale, the abbreviated Injury scale,
and there is a lot that goes into it, and
they were kind enough to basically create a handbook that
they shared with these car testers and car makers UM
(33:04):
so that they could they could take this data and
translate it into injuries so they could say, like, oh, well,
the crash test dummy had a load of you know,
five million Newton's on what would be the femur, and
so the femur would have just snapped in eight pieces
so that would be this number, and so that that
(33:25):
abbreviated Injuries Report UM is taken into account and translated
further into the rating systems because the National Highway Traffic
Safety Administration basically looks at how the car holds up
in producing injuries, and then the i h S looks
at how the car holds up and crashes as far
(33:45):
as injuries goes. And then also the other UM, the
other occupant um safety stuff too, like like the seatbelts,
the airbags, all of that stuff, right, And you mentioned
in is when things and it's it's kind of horrifying
to think of they were doing good work up until.
It's not like it was it's willy nilly or anything.
(34:07):
But when you look at all the changes they've made since,
you're kind of like, man, it took that long to
start considering some of this stuff because it still seems
a little behind the curve even with the updates. Yeah,
as far as body types and all that stuff, for sure. Um,
So they change things in the new star ratings came
out in eleven, and cars that were previously getting four
(34:31):
and five star ratings in every category, in all of
a sudden, we're getting like three stars maybe or maybe
even two stars under the new system. And that's because
they have these new injury parameters. They're adding these different
tests now, um they're using the different size dummies. They're
now using that again, that small adult female instead of
(34:53):
the five ten one seventy email. Who if I ever
weigh literally a hundred, because I'm about five ten. If
ever weigh a hundreds eventy on the nose, I don't
know that. I'm either going to try and gain five
or lose five. I don't want to be one seventy
on the nose. Okay, you don't want to be median.
I get that. I don't want to, And hey, I'm
doing a great job so far, nowhere close to right.
(35:15):
You're just playing it safe. Yeah yeah, But if I
go in some massive weight loss campaign, I'm gonna I'm
gonna stop at like one eighty and be like I
like a little chunk around the middle. That's what I'm
going for is one eight as well? Maybe yeah that's
a good way. But you're you're like six ft though, right,
I am five ft eleven and a half. It just
irks me and getting smaller, yeah, just like the average
(35:37):
mail yep, you'll be five ten one day, my friend.
Do you think so? Now? Probably not that short. But
I used to be a solid five tin and now
I'm like five note and a half. What happens? What
are you're just getting compressed? I don't know. I think
that's a good uh. I mean you shrink as you
get older. That's a good shorty, I think, Okay, why
do you shrink? I don't know. We'll have to find
(35:57):
out and tell everybody. Uh. Some of the other key
parts of the post is uh. The NHTSA started assigning
a single overall safety score from front side and rollover,
with front having the heaviest weight of that overall score.
They started started putting in these additional measures for uh,
(36:20):
for neck extension, chest deflection, and femur and I think
they didn't have that before, which is kind of horrifying. Uh.
What else? I think they added the poll test? Yeah,
running into polls. It's a big one too. One of
the things that they did that really change things is
that rather than just getting an absolute score based on
(36:41):
their criteria, they started pitting cars against one another. Two.
Oh yeah, that's a that's a huge one. That was
an enormous change because now they're like, okay, you want
to be the best, well you've got to be the
best in the industry. You can't just be like, you know, yes,
we're all going to meet this. And that was one
reason why those two thousand ten changes were aid and
one reason why the i h S keeps changing its tests.
(37:04):
They're not like like any time they they they create
a new test or they create a new standard, all
of the automakers rushed to meet that UM and some
of them may already meet it or come close. They
won't have to do too much to meet those higher
standards because they're already over designing beyond what were the
requirements before. But the rest of the industry, if you
(37:26):
don't know by now, just from like our Pinto episode alone,
the auto industry is really lazy sometimes when it comes
to overdesigning UM. They will sometimes meet minimum requirements even
when they're exceeding minimum requirements. And this is a good
example of that because with the n h T S A,
when they're doing crash tests, they're basically just doing it
(37:46):
for fun. This is again not this is not law.
Like you can get a one star rating from the
n h T A T S A and you're fine,
like it just looks bad to your consumer. But the
fact that it looks bad you're consumed humor means that
the automaker will scramble to try to get that five
star rating. But then they'll they'll hack it, they'll figure
(38:07):
it out, Like all we have to do is focus
on the whole front crumple zone. We don't have to
worry about the driver's side of the passenger side of
the bumper. We just have to worry about the whole
front because that's what the n h T s A
does when they're doing tests, and if we can meet
that standard, we'll get that five stars. Well, when the
n h T s A and the i h S
change their standards all of a sudden, the industry has
(38:29):
to scramble to catch up to become like that gold standard.
And they do it again and again and again to
keep safety getting better and better and better, and then
also finding new things that had been overlooked before to
make those parts of cars safer as well, which is
pretty cool. I mean, like this is again, this is superfectly.
None of this is mandated. It's not mandatory. No one,
(38:51):
no car maker has to cement us. They actually don't
even have a choice because these agencies are going and
buying their own cars and crashing them. And there's nothing
legal about that, um, but they just the fact that
somebody's out there doing this, I think is just such
a great It's just a great example of people caring
about other people. Yeah, and you know, it's gotten to
(39:12):
the point where if you have a newer car with
the air bags and such and safety standards and you
and you wear your seat belt. Um, there are outliers,
of course, with just these horrific car wrecks that do happen.
But if you're just talking about a standard, even bad
car crash, you are gonna fare pretty well these days
(39:35):
thanks to the work that all these people have done
over the years. Um, again, there are outliers, but uh,
they have made cars really, really incredibly safe. Um to
get into what I would just describe as sort of
a normal car wreck and not a fender bender, like
you know, a carrect that even might look pretty gnarly,
and you see him on the road, you know, you
(39:57):
see two cars You're like, oh my gosh, and you
see people standing outside like giving the officer there you know,
the account of what happened, and you're just like, man,
there it is right there, Like those people are are
standing there talking to somebody, whereas you know, two decades
ago they were probably you know, maybe not even alive.
Which is just a testament to all the work they've done.
(40:19):
Um one way, they really need to ramp it up.
And I couldn't tell if they are actually even doing
this testing yet, but some of that stuff you sent
pointed out says that like there's still sort of crashing
similar cars into one another. Oh yeah, that's a big one,
and that's a big deal these days when you've got
these you know what happens when a suburban crashes into
(40:42):
a Honda Civic. Um, these are two very much mismatched cars,
not just in overall size, but bumper height is a
big deal, and these bumpers are made to hit one
another and then operate accordingly from there. If a bumper
is going over the other bumper, uh, we often happens
in these cases of a big suv or a big
(41:02):
truck compared to a smaller car. Uh. That this is
where you're going to see a lot of like kind
of bad injuries happening. And I don't know if they're
actually testing for that, if they're just talking about, like, hey,
what do we need to do to test the stuff
right exactly? UM. I don't know if they are yet either,
but they seem to be on the precipice, if not
another one. Um. Another criticism I've seen of both groups
(41:24):
is that they're they're testing these at thirty five miles
an hour forty miles an hour. Everybody's like, well, I'll
drive a heck of a lot faster than forty miles
an hour. What would my car doing sixty, you know,
or seventy or eighty something like that. Um, And that's
a that is a big criticism. The both agencies pushed
back and say, this is this is where most of
the accidents happen. I'm sure they're basing that in statistics,
(41:48):
and I would probably tend to say, okay, yes, but
what about the you know, maybe that's fifty one percent,
but what about the fort that is, you know, much
faster than that. And I think if they did start
crash testing at higher speeds, cars would be showing to
be kind of pitiful and in handling that, and maybe
automakers would start to scramble to catch up to that too. Well, yeah,
(42:11):
because they're kind of working on the assumption, which may
be correct, that most of these wrecks are happening in
like neighborhoods and not necessarily on the expressway. But what
about the guy who's driving sixty through the neighborhood. You know,
they're they're saying like this, this is assuming people are
driving the speed limit, which is not the case. And
(42:32):
we have a street very near my house that is, uh,
you know, it's not a highway, but people drive like
it's a highway because it's really long and straight and
sort of runs between all these residential neighborhood streets, and
you know, people go sixty seventy. It's just ridiculously. No, dude,
I've extra this like point where I've turned into an old,
(42:53):
middle aged and screamed, too fast in your neighborhood. Hellow
down somebody driving too asked it's it's man, and it
is very like I can't, I can't help it. I
can't not do it. Yeah, And I live um near
an intersection, and there's a curve in my street before
the intersection, so people will come around the curve and
(43:13):
if they see the lightest green, they will just hammer
it to try and make that light, and like all
of a sudden they're going like literally like fifty miles
in front of my house, and I just, man, it
makes me so mad. Yeah, I'm with you. It's so
angry about that stuff. There's just no point because well
it's because it's you know, you know the deal. Sure,
people driving that fast to save what ends up being
(43:36):
thirty seconds to the stoplight. It's just when you outweigh
risks and what you're gaining, Like, even if you think
you're in a hurry, you're really not. In the end
getting there that much quicker, like a minute or two
isn't that big of a difference. And it's just it's
unnerming that people take that kind of risk just to
make a light. Nice. Nice, don't do it people. That's
my soapbox moment. Yeah, I think you just stay up
(43:58):
there on that soapbox, buddy. That is a big one.
Can I come down to P No, you've made your bed,
now you have to stand in it. P in it?
You got anything else? I got nothing else. I got
one more thing. One of the reasons why I also
love the I h S is the highest possible rating
you could get from them is just good, yeah, poor,
(44:21):
marginal acceptable, and then good? How do we do good? Nothing?
Nothing better, no exclamation points, no comfetti. Uh. Well, since
Chuck and I both said good, that means, of course,
everybody's time for a listener mail. Uh. This is from
our Trepid Nation episode, which just dropped today in real time.
(44:44):
Hey guys, I was listening to the episode on tree panning,
and I feel like I am such adult. I literally
had never thought of craniotomies? Is the modern version of
uh tree penning? Treppening? What did we end up with
tree panning? I don't know. Trip tree painting doesn't sound
familiar trip panning, even though I knew about the ancient practice.
(45:06):
This is really funny because I had a craniotomy. I
have a Chiari malformation syndrome. I have kilary. I think
it's c H I a r I, and I bet
you it's not Ri. You gotta say it like an
Italian person. Chi malformation syndrome, and part of decompression surgery
(45:28):
was a crany craniotomy. This totally computes with the idea
of ancient people using trip panning to relieve chronic headaches.
Since one of Ki's main symptoms is terrible, terrible, constant headaches.
Something else you said in the episode helped me make
sense of something my neurosurgeon said too. When discussing the
diagnosis and what the decompression surgery would achieve, he briefly
(45:48):
said that some people think of surgery actually can help
cure depression, even though there's no evidence. I had never
heard of that and certainly wasn't looking for that for
that case. Myself just wanted to stop falling over. But
you mentioned in the episode that there were a lot
of internet rumors that trepanning can help with depression, So
now I know why he said that. Anyway, there's a
fun I've said listen to and kind of see myself in.
(46:11):
So thanks for that. Keep up the good stuff that
is from Amanda. Awesome, Amanda. I'm really glad we could
kind of connect the pieces for you. Yeah, and I
hope you're doing well. Yeah, me too. I hope you're
not following over any longer and you don't have headaches. Agreed.
If you want to get in touch with us, like
Amanda did, then you can send us an email to
Stuff Podcast at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff You Should
(46:38):
Know is a production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts
my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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Chuck Bryant
Josh Clark
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