Are there any studies that back up your claims that small cars would reduce the death toll? I follow the intuition, but China has over twice as many deaths per car on the road as the United States: (36 per 100k vs 15) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-re...
There are of course other factors going on than just the weight of the cars, e.g. traffic laws, enforcement, community norms around driving, ratio of scooters and motorcycles, car safety ratings, etc etc etc. but there are difficult tradeoffs here too. An egg-car will cause less damage in a low velocity impact with a pedestrian, but at highway speeds it will also do less to protect its passengers.
I actually don't follow the intuition. The thought of putting a smart fortwo into a barrier at speed terrifies me, whereas I've done it in a Toyota Camry (pedestrian on freeway over blind crest, nowhere to go), gotten out unharmed, and driven a rental to work the next day. Also if I hit a pedestrian at 25mph I don't think it matters which I'm driving.
The ads don't help. They show the car's frame holding up a pickup truck and so forth; yeah, that's great and all, but how about crumple zones?
Crumple zones and needing a 'big car' is old fashioned safety.
Probably the best cars to study are the big brothers of the Smart Car - the Mercedes A and B series. The original A series had a problem with the elk test, that was fixed and is a side issue to the main safety advances.
The passenger cell is the key part, ideally you want the engine to go under it rather than land in the passengers laps. That is a key innovation for whether you can walk out afterwards.
Next is the steel the passenger cell is made of. It doesn't crumple, things bounce off it.
Then the real big innovations for survival are inside the passenger cell. Those airbags, the way the seat belt tensions, the way the steering column collapses. These are big things.
There is a 'Fifth Gear' episode on Youtube that you can watch to see how all of this works. They crash a big Volvo that happens to be a decade old and built when the crumple one was king into a modern Renault hatchback. In the hatchback the passenger compartment stays as is, all of the airbags go off, the crash test dummies walk off with not so much as a scratch. Even the doors open. Meanwhile, the Volvo is a scene of carnage. The firemen have to cut the crash test dummies out, leaving their amputated legs behind.
Personally I would want a full rally-car style roll cage inside whatever car I had if I had to have one, however, I gave up driving after crashing into an on-coming car :-) That was a turning point for me, I no longer derived pleasure from speed or sitting in traffic. I cycle now, or get the train. The accidents I am particularly keen to avoid are the rapid decelerations where, regardless of airbaggage, the brain crashes into the inside of one's skull to result in the same sort of complications Shumaker is having now (wish him well). His incident was skiing, not driving, but the same principle applies.
Speaking of F1, I would like to see a Google car do the new Electric Formula E series, lapping every driver on the grid like some mad Scalextric car, taking the most optimal lines through the bends and learning the track to go quicker and quicker... In F1 would be cool too, like an automotive version of IBM's chess playing adventures, taking on World Champions and just beating them hands down. That would be cool.
> Crumple zones and needing a 'big car' is old fashioned safety.
No. This is modern design. In the very cool Fifth Gear episode, you're seeing a car that is not designed with a good rigid passenger cell component (and also fails to transfer the energy of the crash around the passenger cell). Both cars have crumple zones. They are not all created equal.
> A misconception about crumple zones sometimes voiced[citation needed] is that they reduce safety for the occupants of the vehicle by allowing the body to collapse, therefore risking crushing the occupants.
> Crumple zones work by managing crash energy, absorbing it within the outer parts of the vehicle, rather than being directly transmitted to the occupants, while also preventing intrusion into or deformation of the passenger cabin.
All modern cars have crumple zones - though smaller cars like the smart and A/B Class have very short crumple zones.
The difference in your video is the improvements in passenger safety cell construction - much of which comes down to higher strength steel being used in the passenger safety cell. Compare the size of the door pillars between a modern car and one from the 90s - in modern cars they are often twice as thick.
A modern volvo of the same size will fare even better than the renault.
There are of course other factors going on than just the weight of the cars, e.g. traffic laws, enforcement, community norms around driving, ratio of scooters and motorcycles, car safety ratings, etc etc etc. but there are difficult tradeoffs here too. An egg-car will cause less damage in a low velocity impact with a pedestrian, but at highway speeds it will also do less to protect its passengers.