Arrgh. No.
Don’t get me wrong, the “M-body” Chryslers are fine cars, but none of them are land yachts. They are Compacts that got stretched to make them Mid Sized.
The Land Yacht version of the Gran Fury was made from 1974 to 1977, and 220 inches long by 80 inches wide (that’s 18 feet 4 inches by 6 feet 8 inches)
In 1980 and 1981, the Gran Fury name appeared on a Full Sized car that looked and felt smaller. While the length was the same, it was down to 77 inches wide.
And from 1982 on, the Gran Fury name was an a car 204 inches long by 72 inches wide. Contrast this with the 1967 to 1976 Dodge Dart, which was 196 inches long by 72 inches wide. The Dart had a 111 inch wheelbase, which the Gran Fury stretched to 112.
Again, I have nothing against the Dodge Dart. I’ve owned 2, and learned to drive on my Father’s Plymouth Valiant. Plus, I owned two different Dodge Aspens, which is the car that became the Gran Fury in 1982, and I loved them both. They are great cars. But they aren’t land yachts, they are small.
(At least, by comparison and by the standards of the times.)
My Royal Monaco came with a thing called the Fuel Minder System. It was a light that glowed to warn you when you were burning fuel inefficiently. With a light touch on the throttle the light never came on, and a 400 cubic inch V8 with a 2-barrel carburetor pulling a 3-ton car got 22mpg city, 28mpg highway. And it always passed emissions testing with flying colors ( 0.00% unburned hydrocarbons).
Contrast with my 1985 Delta 88, where the poor little engine worked so hard just to make the car move that the best I ever got was 16mpg, and 8 was much more common.
My 1975 Dodge had disc on the front, drum on the rear.
And, my 1972 Dodge Dart had the shoulder belt as a separate belt from the lap belt, as did my grandfather’s 1970 Impala. That isn’t a safety issue by itself, but it does make one more apt to just buckle the lap belt for a short trip, and it also indicates that maybe some cars of that period might not have shoulder belts. I’m pretty sure my Father’s 1967 Valiant had only lap belts.
I agree that’s a common bias.
But there’s also a reasonable complaint. In an all steel car with steel bumpers, one could ram a solid object at 10mph and take no damage. (I, in fact, have done so.) Occupants might have bumps and bruises, but no life threatening injuries. and you just drive away.
I have seen a modern car bump the back of a pickup truck at a stop light, probably in the 5-10mph range, and the whole front bumper and related bodywork fell off. No due to shoddy workmanship, but because it was designed to.
It seems to me that, in the interest of saving lives at highway speeds, we have made cars that turn out to be very fragile at parking lot speeds.
SpyOne: that’s true (though I think what you probably saw was the bumper cover falling off, rather than the bumper itself). But I don’t see that as a problem. If I had to choose, I would choose a car that could protect me in a high speed impact but couldn’t protect itself in a low speed impact every time.
The actual bumper is behind the fascia. But yes, we’ve decided that the occupants are worth more than the car. Plus, insurers would much rather pay out a few thousand $$$ to fix or replace a busted up car than hundreds of thousands of $$$ from trying to fix a busted up person.
I’m going to regret getting back in this but --------- it isn’t like this is the first mistake in judgement I’ve made on the Dope.
I agree with a lot of what you say and would like to add an additional thought. In a manner of speaking, the 50s cars did have crumple zones behind all the major steel used in construction - all the dead air space between the major structural components. Plenty of space in the engine compartment for the fenders and more to bend into, plenty of dead air in the doors, lots of assorted areas like that. And with bench seats, you aren’t sitting in a bucket locked in place. It’s one of the reasons they could take a fairly stiff hit and still be repaired where a modern car is pretty much throw away at anything over 30mph. Also why you weren’t likely to be pinned in the car after a wreck. I doubt it was part of the plan; just the nature of how they were made - the requirements of the assembly line back then. But those zones did exist and worked to a various degrees.
Then again, once you were thrown out of the vehicle ------------ not a lot of help.
a “crumple zone” is not about having “space” in a certain zone, “dead air” or otherwise. It’s about designing the structure of the car forward and aft of the passenger cage to collapse in a controlled manner, dissipating energy along the way and reducing the mechanical shock impulse delivered to the cabin. on a modern car, the front “subframe” horns and rails are designed to collapse and compress like the bellows of an accordion. That takes time to occur (thus reducing the accelerations felt by the occupants) and since plastically deforming metal makes it hot, it dissipates energy from the collision to the environment as heat, thereby reducing the total energy transferred to the occupants. Once the crumple zone has collapsed, the passenger cage (basically the “hoop” defined by the roof, A-pillars, front door bulkhead/aperture, rocker boxes, and C/D pillar bulkhead/door aperture) is supposed to rigidly resist any intrusion into the passenger compartment.
On an old ('50s-‘80s) car, it didn’t really matter how much “space” there was between the front bumper and the cabin. The bumper was all but useless at road-speed collisions, the frame/subframe would just buckle, break, or tear free from the body, and the non-rigid A-pillar would just bend and let the colliding vehicle ram the dashboard into the front seat occupants’ faces. Plus, the seats could tear free from the floor helping to slam the occupants into the dashboard.
bench seats had nothing to do with anything, this comment of yours is nonsense. seats don’t “pin” you into a vehicle. an old car with bench seats would have you “pinned” in the vehicle after a crash because the firewall caved in and has trapped your legs between the seat and the dashboard, or your foot in the folded-up floorpan, or any number of other possibilities.
a modern car might be “Throw away” at anything more than a 30 mph collision, but you’ll likely be able to open the door and walk out of the car afterwards. Anything more than a 30 mph collision in one of those old land yachts, and you’ll need immediate medical attention. That is, if you were still breathing when they got there.
they did not exist. and as such, they could not work. Watch the videos MacTech just posted links to. Look especially at the one of the 2009 Malibu vs. the 1959 Bel Air. pay close attention to the video segments taken from inside the cars. Note how as the cars collide, the dashboard of the 2009 Malibu barely moves. Notice how as the car crumples up during the collision, once everything forward of the front door is smashed in, the other car intrudes no further. Then go look at the interior video from the '59 Bel Air. Watch as the Malibu buckles the frame of the Bel Air, and how it plows right through the bumper, fenders, and firewall and force-feeds the dash to the dummy. Also watch how the seats break free from the structure of the car.
in such a collision, the driver of the Malibu would have been able to open the door and get out of the car. The driver of the Bel Air would have been dead almost instantly, with half of his/her body broken.
The notion that old cars were safer because they were bigger/heavier/had big bumpers/etc. is nothing more than a myth which needs to die.
You didn’t say where you are from, but like everyone else is saying, smog regulations are a consideration. Here in California, if you live in an urban area, you have to pass smog regulations unless the car is 1975 or older. If I buy an old truck, I’m definitely looking at one older than that. From what I understand, if you live in a rural area, you don’t have to get it smogged. This rule may have changed since I last looked at it.
There was a big push for safety improvements through the 60’s (Nader and all that) but things kind of stagnated for a while after that. Cars from 1970 were undoubted better than cars from 1960 in terms of safety, but from 1970 to 1980 not a whole lot changed. Things started getting better in the 80’s, but the problem is that designing a body and frame that will dissipate energy well really requires starting from the ground up, and the big land yachts were all based on older platforms and so were some of the slowest to actually start seeing improvements to crash survivability.
Although another thought if safety really is a priority is that the European luxury makes got serious about safety a lot sooner. They’re obviously a very different feel than the big old American boats, but something like a Mercedes 300D or 450SEL will wrap you in a certain type of Carter-era excess and will treat you a little bit better in a crash.
More or less. You will probably get airbags in an 80s car, which helps, but you also want to look for things like anti-intrusion bars (which AFAIK don’t start showing up in US vehicles until the early 90s, though jz can probably correct me).
The big problem is/was body-on-frame construction - the frame was a massive beam which did not absorb impact - it transmits pretty much 100% of the force all the way through the car.
One of the first safety requirements was, believe it or not, a "5 mph bumper’ - a bumper which could withstand a whopping 5 mph impact without damage.
The sheet metal bumpers of the 60’s gave way to shock-mounted bumpers somewhere in the 70’s (with Detroit predicting that complying with the regulation would cause ruinous costs).
The 1956 Ford was a model of safety - it actually had a padded dash, so your head could hit it an not be completely crushed.
Then you can look into impalement by steering column - always a fun sight for first responders.
You want an old land yacht, give up the idea of a safe car - Detroit hated the idea of incurring costs just to improve survivabilty - it was something on the order of ‘Survival of the Fittest’ - if you want to live, don’t wreck your car!
