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Originally Posted by apachelongbow That is all good, but what about actual Indian road conditions? A quick glance on the accidents in India thread show BMW/Mercedes/Audi and all high end cars crumpling like tin cans and killing occupants inside simply because they hit a truck/bus chassis and there was no way that the car could have protected the occupants from the impact. |
True, true. This safety topic has been all the rage in this forum for a couple of years now, one side saying that the European manufacturers have got it all figured out and the other saying that weight or so called "tank"ness or sheet metal gauge do not matter as much as intelligent design, reinforcement structure and reliability. Any person should know by now that both sides are correct in some ways, and very, very wrong in most others. The NCAP tests are just a basic outline for safety, it shows what would happen at the standard speed of 64 kmph when a car meets with the rear end of another stationary car (the blue box like barrier is not rigid and is meant to simulate another vehicle). This is taken as the benchmark and nothing more, real world accidents be it in India, China or America will differ very much. The only safety test that is most brutal and exacting of a car's safety standards is the AIIHS with its overlap crash against rigid barriers and even that is not all that practical.
Scientifically, the sheet metal has very little to do with safety.. there is no arguing that thicker or more rigid sheet metal can prevent dents, and also prevent rattling to some extent more than lesser rigid sheets. Here again, there are some exceptions like carbon-fibre or toughened plastic being used as roof/hood/bumpers which are much lighter yet resist dents because they simply pop back in most circumstances.
The body shell, now this has an unarguable basis to safety. Be it the frontal crash beam, cross-welded door pipe beams, rigid high tensile roof support beams etc. They all come together to decrease the gravitational force in the case of an accident yet crumple at the right places so that only the portion outside the cabin is subjected to crushing power of the reverse gravitational force and impact.
Electronic safety assists like ABS, airbags, lane change warnings, EBD etc also play a very big role in the safety sense, as long as the body shell is well planned out. Both however, also depend on safe, conservative driving and using seatbelts as the first line of safety. No car is safe when above a certain speed and surely not when seatbelts aren't worn.
Now that that's said, yes the situation is indeed unique in India. Flashback to just a decade ago, airbags and safety weren't even in the top 10 list of things in an average Indian consumers mind when buying a car. Today it makes the top 3 easily. We have a huge variety of vehicles for our jugaad loving population to travel in, be it autos, buses or bikes and they constitute the primary threats for car drivers. No 2 accidents in India are ever the same so all we have now are the standardised test results which can give a certain benchmark of safety. It isn't about whether a car is the safest, it is more like how much safer is the car compared to one in the same price bracket. When it came to Kwid, Celerio and Eon the results were least surprising.. each failed in its own way although the Kiwd really took a beating. The Scorpio was no surprise either, it remains an old model and I seriously doubt Mahindra thinks of safety more than they do, value, space & power. These results will give a good start to the clarity and transparency increase with regard to safety when on the road. Will this result in 100% safer cars for the nation? NO, even America and Europe do not have 100%, not even close to that.. but it sure will make existing models safer than ever before and also bring about a new awareness that while a car can indeed be more comfortable & safer than an auto or 2 wheeler, one must always invest wisely when it comes down to it.. a 20-30% cost increase for a top trim with electronic safety assists is always better than buying basic trim and of course.. investing in a new or even 2nd hand Rs.5-10 lakh car would ensure much better protection than in a new < Rs.5 lakh car. Lets take the positives out of these sample crash tests, it can only get better from now.