Dateline crashes your truck.

Great Debates
1

I read this earlier today then caught Dateline just a few minutes ago, they were looking at the Insurance Institute’s crash test results of some of the most popular vehicles in North America, pickup trucks. These vehicles performed very poorly in their offset crash test with the exception of the Toyota Tacoma.

You can see the episode here and watch some video that could be pretty scary if you happen to own one of these models.

There might be quite a few Ford 150’s going on the market in the next couple of days, if I owned one I would be looking to buy myself a Toyota instead as it was the only winner in the tests.

On the bright side, this kind of negative publicity has often motivated companies to improve their product. Let’s hope that this happens.

One of the criticisms from GM was that these tests don’t reflect real world driving conditions although these companies are happy to use any positive results in their advertising.

My nephew was involved in a near head on crash at 60 miles per hour and survived so I think that the Insurance Institute’s test is a good reflection of many the accidents we see happening on the roads. (He was driving a Jeep Cherokee).

Did anyone else catch this and have any thoughts?

2

Let’s not forget that it was “Dateline” that faked a GM truck exploding a few years back. They wanted to do a story about gas tank fires in accidents, and needed some dramatic footage, so they loaded a truck with pyrotechnics and crashed it, while telling the audience that this was a typical crash of a normal truck.

3

Dateline (the show) didn’t actually do the crashing, the IIHC did. The IIHC’s report can be found {url=“http://www.hwysafety.org/news_releases/2001/pr060401.htm”] here.

4

^%@^%@(*&&!!!

Let’s try this again…

HERE.

5

Thoughts?

Yeah, it’s a typical “sound bite” NBC news item, fueled by somebody’s need for publicity, in this case, one Brian O’Neill, Esquire, who is with the gloriously named “Insurance Institute for Highway Safety”. It’s funded by insurance companies, who of course are only interested in the health and safety of the American Consumer, and aren’t one bit interested in making cars less breakable and thus avoid having to pay out quite so much money every year.

Most of the article deals with structural damage to the trucks in question. O’Neill spends most of his time looking at the breakage, saying things like

and

Wooo! :rolleyes:
He is asked, “Is this a fatality?” and all he can come up with is,

In other words, he doesn’t know. He’s really only interested in how the truck looks, not in whether anyone would have survived.

Don’t rush out to get rid of your bigass Ford trucks just yet, folks, just because The O’Neill says he wouldn’t drive one.

The manufacturers quite reasonably, IMO, declined to comment. If they commented on every group who decided to second-guess industry standards, they’d be here all night.

And this–

–is just stupid. Sorry, Brian. Automakers have been working on car safety for over 50 years, long before Brian O’Neill, Esquire was even born. Get real. :rolleyes:

6

I saw the Dateline show last night. While I wouldn’t head out and try to sell my (hypothetical) F-150 tomorrow based on this, I don’t share Duck Duck Goose’s scorn for the whole study.

I have no cites for this (and I’m not sure just what sort I’d expect to find), but I was under the impression that the IIHS was generally fairly well-respected. Kind of surprising, I’ll grant, given who it’s funded by. It’s also certainly true that auto makers don’t hesitate to quote the IIHS’s test results when they’re favorable - a point made on the show.

Most of the analysis given on the show was focused on deformation of the truck cab. Now, I’d have preferred that some attention be given to the forces and loads suffered by the test dummy - which it was instrumented for - but I assumed that Dateline figured that its target audience wouldn’t be very interested in that and directed the focus of the interview elsewhere, to cooler and more eye-catching stuff.

That “elsewhere” would be deformation/crushing of the cab. While you could simply toss that off as being interested “only in damage”, I strongly disagree. I’m fairly confident that they were all totalled, so the body shop bill is pretty much inconsequential - even to the insurance company. The whole point was that in several of those trucks, the cab was deforming to the extent that the driver’s legs were being crushed - hardly irrelevant. The difference between the Tundra and the F-150 was considerable in that regard.

The quote of, “The forces recorded on the dummy’s head and neck in this crash were sufficient, that if a person experienced those forces, one possible outcome could be a fatal injury,” from O’Neill was, in my opinion, a carefully worded response to a loaded question. The on-camera reporter asked him (about the Ford test), “Is this a fatality?” I believe that a one-word answer - “yes” or “no” would have been inaccurate, and O’Neill was trying to get around that. The reporter would have loved to have landed some kind of “Ford Trucks Kill” soundbite, which O’Neill properly avoided giving. All O’Neill said was that the forces suffered by the dummy could kill - any statement stronger than that would have been pure BS. Some people would have survived such a crash, while others may not have.

The big question I have about all this is one of repeatability. All of this stuff is based on exactly one crash of each model in question. I doubt anybody thinks that the same model crashed ten times would produce precisely identical results, but some handle on the just how variable we could expect it to be would be reassuring. Perhaps the IIHS has done some studies and estimates on this - I don’t know.

I do appreciate that these tests are very expensive - on the show we watched $80-$90,000 worth of truck turned into scrap metal in very short order. That’s certainly motivation for only doing the tests once. And it would be justifiable if some kind of study had been done suggesting that the tests tend to be highly repeatable.

7

I can’t believe that automakers, the US ones at least, have been working on car safety for over 50 years. It’s more plausible, that for the last 35 years the federal government has forced automakers to produce safer cars.

For example. I have a 1965 Ford Mustang. It has two safety features that I can think of - lap belts in the front seats and safety glass windows. It has the following not safe features - a steel tube for a steering column, a hard plastic steering wheel, a steel dashboard with minimal plastic padding, no shoulder belts, seats without headrests, and a gas tank likely to burst into the passenger compartment if it from behind.
If anyone should ever hit my Mustang from behind, I pray that it breaks my neck before it envelopes me in burning gasoline.

Once upon a time, (the 1960’s) the US auto industry argued it didn’t need to make cars that allowed people to survive accidents (my cite to this is at the bottom of a box in the garage) in cases where occupants died in rollover accidents because the roof collapsed or drivers were impaled on steering columns at relatively low speeds. The government and outrageous jury awards eventually forced automakers to make safer cars. They didn’t decide to do it on their own.

8

Devastating! Makes me want to sell my F-150 today.

Actually, this didn’t really stir me up at all. I’ve known for a long time that trucks are not required to meet the same safety standards as passenger vehicles. Knowing this and knowing that price is a better sales motivator than safety, it’s no surprise to see this kind of result. Further, pickups being full-frame vehicles (by necessity) do a much poorer job of absorbing impact energies than unit-body construction. (I don’t have a cite for that last point, but it on the grounds of common knowledge. I will retract it if necessary.)

I need my truck. Not currently having the option of a second vehicle I assuage my concerns with the knowledge (hope?) that any accident I may be in has a strong likelihood of involving a vehicle that is much lighter than mine (good for me, bad for them). In which case the damage to the pickup is unlikely to be as severe.

9

I seem to have failed to include included.

10

[hijack] There is a Corvair out in our office building parking lot. [/hijack] I guess that the threat of death doesn’t send everyone into a panic.

Also, are car companies now saying that offset, head-on collisions are not “real world driving conditions”? Didn’t they say that full on, head-on collisions weren’t “real world driving conditions”, just a few years ago?

11

Not even. Recall the Pinto? Guess who popularized and sensationalized it’s gas tank problems? Right, our buddies at the IIHS. We’ve mentioned the GM thing. Dateline’s problem is that they don’t do real good journalism. It’s not Steak, it’s a candybar, metaphorically speaking.

12

I agree with liebfels…Automobile safety features have improved dramatically in the last 30 years or so (and deaths per passenger mile have dramatically decreased). And this has probably occurred in large part because the government, IIHS, Ralph Nader, and others have dragged the auto industry kicking and screaming into installing these features on cars (either through regulation or increasing public awareness to the point where it the economic case for the automakers to do so became more powerful). [Ralph Nader likes to point out how the automakers now advertise safety features they resisted implementing for years!]

By the way, it is true that many of the safety features existing in technical form…e.g., there were patents on them…they just weren’t finding ways into cars.

So, I think Duck Duck Goose et al. should quit your beefing! Raising public awareness about the dangers of automobiles (which are extremely dangerous…among the top few killers in younger age groups) is important. And while IIHS may have certain alterior motives, I see their motives as being much more aligned to mine than the automobile industry’s!