Cheap Crappy Unibody Cars Rant

In My Humble Opinion
1

Just a piss poor attempt at Mfg saving money at the potential sacrifice of your life and investment. People are so concerned with fuel economy, they negate the extra added benefits of a simple frame on a car. Add a true frame, with modern safety features and airbags! The ‘crumple’ factor of a unibody car actually means “destroy every component under the hood in order soften impact” when you could have a frame that takes a lot of it and you and the other driver may be able to drive it home. Seeing how so many cars are made is making me sick and soon enough I’m going to be one of those assholes with a giant loud truck that has a true frame. :mad:

Not to mention how these cars are made for quick turnaround, one good hit and its totalled, further evidenced by the fairy tale of “closed systems” as in transmissions that “don’t need a fluid change for the life of the vehicle” garbage! People still driving around with the blackened power steering fluid that came with their cars, or brake fluid that looks like mud. it’s as if manufacturers really do want your car to fail so you have to buy another.

Anyhow, I may be wrong and I secretly hope someone can convince me. What about you? In your humble opinion, what do you think of unibody vehicles and how some are constructed?

2

Cars are safer and longer-lasting than ever before. Whatever they’ve been doing is doing the opposite of what you seem to think.

3

I’ve got a ten year old Mazda 2 - the cheapest Mazda sells. Literally nothing has gone wrong except the (Takata) airbag, which was replaced under warranty. I’ve had it since new.
Heck - I’m pretty sure it’s got the original battery!

4

There’s cheap crappy unibody cars and then there are modern unibody cars.

5

what exactly makes you think unibody construction is “cheaper” than body-on-frame? Please provide details beyond “because I think it is.”

people have been saying that for decades, yet the average age of vehicle on the road gets older and older. the only reason old people love to crow about how “everything lasted forever back then” is because they saw one cherry 1957 Chevy Bel Air at an auction. They ignore the hundreds of thousands of 1957 Chevy 150s, Two-tens, Bel Airs, Townsmen, Beauvilles, and Nomads which were smashed or rusted away into nothing. it’s called “survivorship bias.”

Cars do what they do on purpose. it costs a few grand to fix a busted up car. it can cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to fix a busted-up person. It costs a few grand to a few tens of thousands of dollars to replace a busted up car. You cannot replace a busted up person.

Cars are designed to sacrifice themselves to protect the occupants. That’s what crumple zones, airbags, and rigid passenger cells do. 'cos when it comes down to what’s more important- the car? or the people inside of it? and we’ve settled on “fuck the car.”

and don’t fool yourself into believing those old body-on-frame barges were somehow “safe.” The only crash test they were originally designed to do well on was running square into a flat, rigid barrier. Sadly, real-world crashes are almost never like that. That rigid frame would do nothing to protect you when the car colliding with yours doesn’t even touch it, causing the body to be ripped from its mounts and collapse, crushing you.

but hey, don’t ask me, ask this guy. Ask him how well that “rigid frame” protected him and his passengers. I’ll give you a hint: it didn’t.

6

2009 Chevy Malibu vs 1959 Bel Air Crash Test

7

You could have a frame that takes a lot of the impact, or you could have a crumple zone that takes all of it. “Taking the impact” means that those parts don’t survive. This is one of those “modern safety features” that you yourself say that cars should have.

A collision between a full-frame car and a unibody isn’t too bad, because the unibody absorbs the impact for both. In a collision between two full-frame cars, though, while the cars themselves might still be drivable, it won’t be by the people who were in them at the time, who will be pulped.

8

the latter part is still a myth. it assumes the colliding cars impact frame-to-frame, which would mean they collide completely head-on, no angle or offset, with identical bumper/frame heights, and either no braking or both drivers miraculously brake to where both cars nose-dive to keep the bumpers at the same height. i.e. “spherical cow” conditions.

in reality, cars collide at angles, offsets, one driver brakes harder than the other which causes its frame to pass under the other car’s frame allowing the body to collapse and tear free.

not to mention it’s very naive to assume an automotive frame is completely rigid. it isn’t; as with any long column under sufficient compression, it will eventually buckle. you can even see the Bel Air’s frame buckle in the video running coach posted.

For the most part, back in the “old days” cars simply weren’t designed with thought centered around occupant protection. it was just assumed that a bigger car with a frame and “more metal” was safer. alas, it was not. Having a truck-derived frame didn’t make the Chevy Astro safe.

9

I was going with the OP’s assumptions and approximations. Relaxing those assumptions just makes the case for unibodies even stronger.

10

Ignorance fought. Thanks!

I was just ranting, I suppose a lot of my anger of it comes from the fact that big “boat” cars are easier to fix. Radiators are not the first thing to be sacrificed in accidents etc… Hence not having to remove the fuel rail and intake manifold just to change a dang spark plug. If they were made with the simplicity of older vehicles, with modern safety and more frames and better quality parts, it’d be a good change of pace IMHO, pretty much the point I was getting at.

11

That is a fucking crime what they did to that Bel Air. :frowning:

12

the whole point about crash safety is “who gives a crap about the radiator?” If I see an on-coming vehicle cross over the divider into my path, the last thing I’m concerned with is the radiator. I’m hoping my leg doesn’t get crushed, or my dome doesn’t get bounced off of the door frame and A-pillar. Cars are designed the way they are because they’re being designed to protect the occupants in real-world crashes. Hence the moderate overlap and small overlap tests. You think anyone driving a car involved in a collision like that cares about the car? Those kinds of impacts were almost certainly fatal in cars up through the '90s. Cars are replaceable. People aren’t.

Your point is founded in ignorance. what you are asking for is not possible.

13

eh, in another decade when the Boomers are gone, no one will care about a 1959 Bel Air. Hell, I doubt too many people care about it now. the Bel Air was the hot car for '57. For '59 it was the Impala.

yes, even though it was the same car. I think a lot of old guys have forgotten most of what they knew and think the Bel Air was the only thing Chevy made in 1957. Not realizing most people bought 150s and Two-Tens, which were the same car just lesser-equipped.

hell, I don’t particularly care about '50s cars. I think most of them are garish, freakily–styled monstrosities.

14

Not possible for whom? They do make vehicles this way, they are not very common but they do have stellar safety ratings (many new pick up trucks) Surely it is possible to construct a vehicle with “the best of both worlds” I am not arguing anymore that cars are not inherently safer that older models, I am pointing out that the reason they sacrifice some aspects of durability and usability for safety, which is fine, but why not have both?

15

Cars have actually gotten cheaper over time. Dunno if you noticed, but the Honda Accord LX was $18,000 in 1996. That would be 28k in today’s dollars. But the actual 2018 Accord LX is only 23k.

Another factor I don’t think people realize is that gas costs a lot.

The 10 year average gas price is around 3 bucks a gallon.

So a car that gets 30 mpg, over it’s lifespan of ~200k miles (sometimes you get longer, sometimes less), burns $20,000 of gasoline! That’s basically the car’s own cost in gas!

If the car had a heavier frame like you demand and got 22mpg, it would cost $27,000 in gas over it’s lifespan. That $7000 is about 1/3 the price of a brand new car!

So it definitely pays to trade off *slightly *less durability and reliability for fuel efficiency.

Even worse, let’s say that heavier frame car is easy to fix and it sticks around for 300,000 miles. You still see cars from the 1980s like that on the road. A whopping $40,000 in gasoline it’s gonna chug!

And I’m not even factoring in the fact that only suckers buy new. You can get a used car for about half the price of a new car, for about 1/3 that 200k mile estimated vehicle lifespan. So more machinery for your dollar.

So in reality, the smart money is to buy a fuel efficient, unibody car from a reliable manufacturer. Also make sure to pick a reliable model, they are not equal. Toyota or Honda are great choices. And if you get in a wreck and you lose it, unless you’re getting into wrecks all the time or have just the worst luck, you’re going to come out way ahead from the fuel efficiency.

16

If the only two variables were safety and durability it would be possible. But you also need usability, price, economy, size etc. If everyone drove vehicles the size of a full size pickup truck you might be able to meet your requirements, but cars would be much more expensive, pollute more, and be impracticable for most people.

And even then things wouldn’t be safer for the driving public since these large heavy vehicles would be hitting far more large heavy vehicles and the real world crash safety would get worse.

17

Wow. I will admit I did not expect that sort of total annihilation of the Bel Aire. That dummy will not have an open casket.

18

lemme 'splain… no, there is too much. Lemme sum up (Balthisar knows way more about this than me, hopefully he can chime in)

This is what a modern car’s body/chassis structure looks like. The first thing to understand is that a “crumple zone” is not just a part of the car which is allowed to be crushed in a collision. Looking at that image, the front “subframe” consists of those blue rectangular tubes. It’s hard to see, but at various points on the edges of those tubes are “dimples.” Those are there to help ensure that in a collision, those subframe rails will collapse in a controlled manner; they basically “accordion” as they’re being crushed. If you’ve ever bent a piece of sheet metal or plastic back and forth a few times rapidly, you’ve noticed that the crease gets warm/hot. So the rapid collapse of that subframe rail means a ton of the kinetic energy of the crash is getting dissipated as heat. The important result of that is that the crash “impulse” (the rate that the energy of the crash is delivered to the occupants) is slowed considerably. This reduces the likelihood or severity of non-contact injuries like whiplash (Dale Earnhardt Sr. might still be alive if NASCAR race cars had crumple zones.)

then, once those collapsing subframe rails have bled off as much energy as possible, the colliding vehicle now hits the A-pillar/front door bulkhead (shown in gray on the linked picture.) That is the front end of the passenger cage and is designed to be as rigid as possible to stop the colliding vehicle from intruding into the passenger compartment. If you watch the interior camera view of that Malibu vs. Bel Air video, you’ll notice the Malibu’s dashboard hardly moves at all because it stopped the Bel Air from pushing further through it’s structure. In fact, if I remember correctly when this video was produced, IIHS said they could still opent the Malibu’s driver door.

Further, in a frontal crash, as the subframe rails are crumpling, the powerpack (engine/transmission) are designed to drop down and “submarine” under the car to prevent it from being rammed through the firewall.

Old cars simply weren’t designed with any thought to this kind of occupant protection. So in a collision the body structure (whether it’s body-on-frame or unibody) just folds up in random, haphazard ways. Watch the interior camera of the Bel Air. As the Malibu hits it, the body just folds and twists and tears free from the frame. The frame buckles and removes support from the underbody. The Malibu just barges right through the A-pillar, ramming the dashboard into the dummy’s head and torso. Also, the seat pulls free from the floor crushing the dummy between it and the dash.

it doesn’t matter how big the car is, or how thick the sheet metal is, if the structure is just going to collapse.

so I still don’t know what the OP wants out of a modern car. In a collision like that, the driver of a modern car can likely open the door and get out. In an (simple, body on frame) old car, the firefighters can take their time with the extraction since all they’re going to do is sponge you off of the seats.

19

Car frames were flat structures, like this. Just as a general rule, boxes are much stronger than flat structures. If you don’t believe me, take a cardboard box and try to twist or bend the whole box. Now, flatten the box and try to do the same. Notice the difference.

20

I was aware of “crumple zones” and stuff, but thanks for the excellent detailed description and pictures, guys!

In my head I think I imagine ok the Malibu weighs much less than the Bel Aire so it’s going to be like a dog slamming into a horse. You expect the dog to sort of bounce away. I didn’t expect the Malibu to drive so much force into the Bel Aire, I guess. But it would seem that the weight of the Bel Aire (and its engine) is contributing to the force, and the force is building as it shifts into the driver. Yowza.