Crash worthiness/safety features

[shravan316]

Originally Posted by RX135

The indian public mentality is very obvious with the huge outcry against helmet compulsion. Why blame manufacturers? It's governments duty to enforce the rules properly. Why would a company manufacture an expensive safe car, if its rival can get away by selling a cheap but unsafe car.

This is India, and people want FE, low initial and maintainence costs above everthing else.... Safety is the last thing on their mind. Its the Government who is to be blamed for the lack of safety features in a car.
If accidents occur, people around blame it on fate as Sandeep rightly pointed out.

[RX135]

Originally Posted by sandeepdeshmukh

Don't expect the govt to educate people for everything or to come up with rules for practically every single thing..

Well, we are talking about safety of cars being manufactured. It is not a trivial thing. In Europe, people awareness is high as well as law making agencies have enforced stringent safety restrictions on manufactures. It may be difficult to enforce rules on common public, but certainly not at all difficult to enforce it on vehicle manufacturers (How many of them? May be 10 or 20? not more than that in entire India).

[Technocrat]

Originally Posted by v_s_natarajan

the minimum thing I want the manufactureres to do is to have a crash testing facility, subject their cars to it and be monitored/verified/observed by JD Power

Do you really think cars being sold in India are not crash tested ???

agreed their impact rsistance is not as high as the high priced cars but then isn't that obvious ??

[GTO]

Do you really think cars being sold in India are not crash tested ???

Well, the Scorpio hasnt been.

GTO

[Technocrat]

Are you sure about this GTO ??? I really wonder if a company can launc a product like this, even the Tata vehicles are crash tested. & it would be really stupid for a company to launch an SUV w/o crash testing it. & even if they dont the ARAI must be doinng it before giving it a road worthy certificate.

[Samurai]

Originally Posted by Technocrat

The companies only are not to be blamed. Tell me how many ABS vehicles of a car are sold wrt to total sael of that car i.e. out of the entire Accent sales how many are ABS ones.. People want everything cheap, how will the companies do that if they dont get numbers. They are obviously not here for the charity.

Santro Xing comes with ABS as an option. When we booked our Santro Xing AT, I wanted the ABS option eventhough it was 15K extra. The dealer did everything in his powers to discourage us. He said the AT model comes all the way from the factory and it takes 15 days to deliver. But if we insist on ABS, it will take 3 weeks more. We couldn't wait that long, so we gave up on ABS. The car finally arrived after 6 weeks.

[Surprise]

Originally Posted by Samurai

The car finally arrived after 6 weeks.

Fortunately it is much faster in Chennai. Not sure, might be due to their manufacturing unit located in the outskirts of Chennai.

[normally_crazy]

Originally Posted by v_s_natarajan

the minimum thing I want the manufactureres to do is to have a crash testing facility, subject their cars to it and be monitored/verified/observed by JD Power

come on - whats wrong with u guys ??
this is India and u talk abt safety features - Fe and cheap are 2 words that sell a car here !!

as for the safety features - we fit them after we buy the car.. a small Ganesh murti on the dash or a Bhagwaan ka Kapda tied on the mirror !

[drifter]

Originally Posted by normally_crazy

as for the safety features - we fit them after we buy the car.. a small Ganesh murti on the dash or a Bhagwaan ka Kapda tied on the mirror !

i agree....luck has more to do with our saftey features.

Drifter

[v_s_natarajan]

here is what I picked up from the web

The "Perfect" Crash
The ideal crash would be no crash at all. But, let's assume you are going to crash, and that you want the best possible chances of survival. How can all of the safety systems come together to give you the smoothest crash possible?

Surviving a crash is all about kinetic energy. When your body is moving at 35 mph (56 kph), it has a certain amount of kinetic energy. After the crash, when you come to a complete stop, you will have zero kinetic energy. To minimize risk of injury, you would like to remove the kinetic energy as slowly and evenly as possible. Some of the safety systems in your car help do this.

Ideally, your car has seatbelt pretensioners and force limiters; they both tighten up the seatbelts very soon after your car hits the barrier, but before the airbag deploys. The seatbelt can then absorb some of your energy as you move forward towards the airbag. Milliseconds later, the force in the seatbelt holding you back would start to hurt you, so the force limiters kick in now, making sure the force in the seatbelts doesn't get too high.

Next, the airbag deploys and absorbs some more of your forward motion while protecting you from hitting anything hard.

In this hypothetical crash, the safety systems in the car all worked together to slow you down. If you didn't wear your seatbelt then the first stage of your protection is lost and it is going to hurt a lot more when you slam into the airbag. Many cars have seatbelt pretensioners and force limiters, but there are some even more exciting safety improvements coming