Hypothetical scenario: you are being carjacked. You manage to disable the passenger airbag and the attacker sits in the passenger seat without wearing a seatbelt. You plan to drive into a stationary object, hoping your seatbelt and airbag will save you.
Your car is equipped with seatbelts with pre-tensioners and airbags.
[ol]
[li]What’s the maximum speed you can impact at without being injured?[/li][li]Is this a good plan? Are the injuries of both of you likely to be very different because of your seatbelt and airbag?[/li][/ol]
I realise this will depend on your model of car, but just a rough idea will do.
Most seat belt studies claim a 40-50% reduction in injury risk, so to make up some numbers, let’s suppose crashing at 30mph gives you a 15% chance of serious or fatal injury, and a 30% chance for your carjacker. Or 50mph gives you a 45% chance and a 90% chance for your carjacker.
IMHO this might be worthwhile if you know the carjacker is definitely planning to kill you, but otherwise it is not a great idea.
Some cars (my Mazda 3 for example) have a button for disabling the passenger airbag if there is someone too small in the passenger seat, where a functional bag would be dangerous.
I was going about 15 MPH through an intersection when I hit a patch of ice and slid into a steel signal pole. Airbag deployed, and I was not injured at all.
Obligatory SDMB nitpick: it depends on the object.
A grape is an object, and will remain stationary until a force acts on it. I’m pretty sure you can crash into a stationary grape at pretty much any speed you can reasonably achieve in a vehicle.
I think I understood you to mean a stationary object.sufficiently massive as to be efffectively immovable in the provided context, but this is the SDMB, where someone will always nitpick a scenario- this time, it was me
Probably not. Every vehicle I’ve seen that has such a switch has it in the dashboard, near the climate controls, and can only be turned with the ignition key. There’s no way to turn it off while the vehicle is on, by design.
There are other variables that will impact how effectively this tactic works. When someone is on drugs or drunk (which is not unlikely for a car-jacker), their pain tolerance and reflexes are not normal. The fact that drunk drivers don’t tense up immediately prior to a high-speed collision is part of why drunk drivers so often survive crashes that kill entire families.
So even if you got into a 45mph-head-on-brick-wall-crash, you might just really piss the guy off.
“Windshields today have even more give, enabling the modern-day head to undergo a 30-mph unbelted car crash straight into a wall and come away with little to complain about save a welt and an owner whose driving skills are up there with the average cadaver’s.”
30 mph without seatbelts, it should be higher with seatbelts and airbags?
As long as he does not have his seat belt on you have an excellent chance
Brake HARD then hit solid object. The braking throws your carjacker into the dash and the deployment of the passenger airbag kills him. It is this acceleration by the bag which was fatal to children riding in the front seat. I once read an estimate on the order of 80Gs.
Going “high speed” then turning the car sharply to roll it might be the way to go, particularly if you can make sure the doors are unlocked and the windows are down (even better if its just the hijackers that are down/unlocked). Accidents where cars roll and folks don’t have seatbelts on seem to be very good at actually ejecting said passengers. Or sometimes half ejecting them so they get crushed as the vehicle rolls over their halfway out bodies.
Rolling the car is a very bad idea IMHO. Many high profile vehicles (the kind of vehicle that rolls easy) has a relatively weak roof.
Ever seen a rolled Suburban? If you have chances are the roof was crushed down to the top of the doors in the front seat area. A 7,000 vehicle with a roof made of tin foil.