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Cars Are Safer Than Ever

On September 9, 2009, the Insurance Institute of Highway Safety destroyed a perfectly good 1959 Chevrolet Bel Air. This wanton dispatching of a perfectly good 50-year-old Chevy dismayed lovers of vintage cars, but it did add a “Thank God” to the old saying, “They just don’t build them like they used to.”

Presumably as a part of celebrations marking its Golden Anniversary year, the IIHS set up a mano a mano matchup between a 2009 Chevrolet Malibu and the hoary Bel Air. One round, no timeouts.

In one of those cold, unwelcoming crash-test buildings, the two cars and their dummy pilots smacked each other at a speed of 40 mph in the front-offset format. That meant that the Bel Air’s left headlight struck the Malibu in about the middle of its hood. The result was not encouraging to those who believe that ancient iron trumps 21st Century plastic.

If the Bel Air’s dummy driver didn’t “die” in the crash, it would be a simulated miracle. The driver of the Malibu, however, enjoyed the protection of an airbag and seat belts, and got through the encounter bruised but breathing.

Because I am old enough to have driven a 1959 Bel Air when it was new, the IIHS demonstration got me to thinking about just how far we’ve come in the safety area since the year before John F. Kennedy became President of the United States. In those 50 years, we have come to take a lot of now-common safety features for granted. Here are just a few of them.

Tires: Tired no longer regularly blow out or otherwise lose their air supply at the slightest provocation. We often overlook the considerable contributions the tire companies have made to safe vehicle operation.

Seat belts: These things have come from cumbersome urban legends (“My great-uncle’s barber knew a man who was trapped in a burning vehicle by his seat belt.”) to easy-to-use devices that only the criminally dense among us refuse to use.

Airbags: Taken together with seat belts, the airbag has kept no telling how many drivers in their seat after a crash instead of letting them rocket through the windshield. We now also have side and head-level airbags.

Crushable steering columns: Once upon a time it was possible to impale yourself on the steering column and suffer the discomfort that comes with shoving the horn button through your sternum. Not any more.

Antilock braking systems: These lifesavers are as ubiquitous as wheel covers nowadays and demonstrate on a daily basis what a good idea it is to have electronic wizardry keep all four of your car’s wheels turning at the same speed.

Crumple zones: You can see these at work if you watch Indy racing. Instead of using the driver to absorb impact, you use collapsing front ends and engine compartments. This theory can be traced to an old stunt man trick: jumping from the third floor onto a stack of cardboard boxes which collapse in order and diminish the kinetic energy our hero generated during his free fall.

Alcohol awareness impact: Not a feature, but a practice that deserves mention. The involvement of alcohol in vehicular accidents and deaths almost defies overstatement. The IIHS estimates that 40 percent of road fatalities involve alcohol. Bad enough, but down substantially from the 1970s when the figure was 70 percent. The National Institute of Health says that reductions in driving after drinking saved more than 150,000 lives between 1982 and 2001, which would be more than the combined total saved by increases in seat belt use, airbags, and motorcycle and bicycle helmets.

There are of course a bushel of other new safety features—electronic stability control, rear-vision cameras and directional headlights to name just three—and there are dozens more either here or on the way. But suppose we ask what have all these improvements done for us?

The answer is one hell of a lot. Using only a few of the relevant statistics, here’s the story in brief.

In 1959, 36,223 motorists missed their next meal. As a nation we drove 700.5 million miles, and that worked out to 5.2 fatalities per million miles traveled. Last year, with our population having grown from 179.3 million in 1969 to an estimated 300 million today, the year 2008 saw 37,261 highway deaths. U.S. motorists drove 2.9 billion miles last year and averaged 1.27 fatalities per million miles traveled.

In rough numbers, there were 120 million more of us, we drove four times as many miles, and we killed one-fifth as many people. That is beyond outstanding.

But at what cost? In 1959, the average cost of a new car was $2,200 and the average worker made $5,010. In 2008, the average worker earned $40,532 but had to pay $27,958 for a new car. In other words, the buyer paid nearly 40 percent of a year’s take for an automobile in 1959 but had to pay 69 percent in 2008. That’s a stunning rise, and you can bet that a large part of that increase in car prices is due to the inclusion of safety equipment. Imagine how much money the bean counters could thrift (their word) out of a car if they removed all the safety devices added in the past 50 years.

The real question is: Is safety worth it? I think you have to say it is. Otherwise, using the historic yardsticks for fatalities per million miles traveled, you’d have to add about 150,000 motorists a year to the Grim Reaper’s tote board. I say spend the money.

Where is the only oyster museum in the world?

See answer under Car Doctor.

Ask the Car Doctor

How do I tell "normal" tire wear from "abnormal" tire wear?

It's getting harder to tell because of changes in tire and suspension designs. But as a rule, "normal" wear is when the tread wears evenly across the entire surface of the tire. The edges and center sections of the tread wear down at approximately equal rates, and no bumpy, directional, feathered or cupped wear patterns develop on the tread.
What's more, both front tires and both rear tires wear at approximately the same rate. Front and rear tires usually wear at different rates depending on which end is doing the driving. The front tires on front-wheel drive cars and minivans, for example, wear at a much faster rate than the rear tires. The rear tires on rear-wheel drive performance cars or vehicles driven by someone with a heavy foot also tend to wear out much faster than the ones up front. But this is "normal" for the way in which the vehicle is driven.
Heavy shoulder wear on the tires is also considered "normal" if a vehicle is driven hard around corners. Rapid shoulder wear on the front tires is also "normal" on some trucks and minivans because of the steering geometry of the vehicle. The front wheels are supposed to "toe out" with respect to one another when they are turned to either side to compensate for the different path the inside and outside wheels follow when turning a corner. Some vehicles are better designed than others to accomplish this. Those that aren't tend to produce more shoulder wear than those that do. Rotating your tires frequently (every 8,000 miles or so) can help to equalize this kind of wear between tires.
Abnormal Wear
"Abnormal" tire wear is any type of wear that results from a suspension or alignment problem, an internal tire fault, or driving on underinflated or overinflated tires.
Abnormal wear would be where the inside or outside edge or shoulder of the tire shows extreme wear, but the rest of the tread shows little wear. This is called "camber" wear and results from the tire leaning in or out (it should be straight up and down when rolling down the road). Camber wear can be caused by suspension misalignment, a bent strut, a mislocated strut tower (often the result of unrepaired collision damage), a weak or broken spring, a bent spindle, or collapsed or damaged control arm bushings.
The suspension should be inspected for worn or damaged parts, and an alignment check performed to determine what needs to be fixed to correct the problem.
If the tread develops a feathered or directional wear pattern where the tread feels smooth when you run your hand across it one way, but feels rough when you rub it in the opposite direction, you have a "toe" wear problem. Toe refers to the parallelism between the wheels as the roll down the road. If the wheels are toed in or out with respect to one another, the tread will scuff and develop a feathered wear pattern. This may be due to toe misalignment, worn tie rod ends, worn idler arms, bent steering linkage or bent steering arms. As with camber wear, the suspension should be inspected, and the alignment checked to determine what's causing the problem.
A "cupped" wear pattern on the tires can be caused by a wheel and tire that are out of balance or by weak shock absorbers or struts. This type of wear occurs because the wheel bounces up and down as it rolls down the highway. The cure here is to have the wheel balanced or replace the worn shocks or struts.
If the center of the tread is worn more than the shoulders, it may be the result of overinflation. You're putting too much air in your tires, causing them to bulge out in the center and wear unevenly. Refer to the recommended inflation pressures in your owner's manual or on the tire inflation decal in the glovebox or door jamb.
If the shoulders of a tire are worn more than the center, it may mean the tire doesn't have enough air in it. Underinflation shifts the weight carried by the tire to the edges of the tread causing the shoulders to wear more than the center. As with overinflation, refer to the recommended inflation pressure for your vehicle.
NOTE: As mentioned earlier, heavy shoulder wear can also be caused by hard driving, especially on winding or curving roads. In this case, nothing abnormal is indicated, and the only correction that's needed is a change in your driving habits.
Some low profile performance tires have a tendency to develop what's called a "heel and toe" wear pattern if they are not rotated every 5,000 to 8,000 miles. This is caused by tread flex and the belt design of the tires. If tires with this kind of wear tendency are not rotated, the tread may develop a washboard wear pattern that causes annoying vibrations and/or noise at speeds above about 40 mph. Once the wear pattern is established, it may be too late to reverse it by rotating the tires. Replacing the tires (and switching to a brand or design that is less "quirky") may be the only way to cure this kind of wear problem.

The world's only oyster museum is on Chincoteague Island.

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