Who doesn't care about the safety of a car? Safety has been around since the day the car was born, or rather, has been a concern. With the advancement of human industry and technology, car safety is indeed improving, but people's attention to safety has not slackened at all.
Today, a series of scientific and comprehensive testing systems can provide valuable references for consumers, but this is the only one that has existed in the last four decades or so, and is still being perfected. So how did people think about car safety in the early days? I can only summarize this in terms of magic, hardcore, and respectability.
Who is hard and who is justified?
"Japanese cars can't do it, the skin is thin and stuffed, and it must be a German car..." I think many friends have heard this argument. In my personal experience, the elders around me are generally convinced of this, especially the old drivers who have been driving for a long time.
Movie Mad Max 4: Fury Road
"Japanese cars" are not necessarily Japanese cars, generally refers to those cars with serious colors in the slight scratch, "German cars" are not necessarily German cars, mainly refers to those who "have not lost in actual combat", and hit the other party's vehicles into potholes but do not lose paint. In short, the body covering must be hard, otherwise it is unsafe.
You say collapse suck energy? That's all made up by the profiteers to fool people! "I've driven all my life and I'll talk nonsense?"
In the early days of the automotive industry, this perception was really the mainstream of society, and it became one of the general directions for automakers to tackle technology. In the 20th century, American engineers invented the car bumper, and in the following decades, the design and material of the bumper became an important external manifestation of automobile safety. The next two pictures are cars from the 1950s and tandem armor-piercing bombs, which are really similar.
Please pay attention to the front bumper of this car
Armor-piercing bullets
The important point of knowledge came, and it was the German manufacturer who overturned the theory of "who is hard and who is justified". German engineers pioneered the theory of rigid crew compartments and front and rear collapse energy absorption, and brought this theory to actual products. In the late 1950s, car safety improved rapidly, three-point seat belts were introduced, and dummies were also used in car crash tests.
There are no dummies before using real people.
Crash test hardcore and magical
The challenge of simulating a real-world collision is not how to get the car to run, but how to assess the extent of injury to the people inside the car. Before 1959, dummies had not yet been introduced in car crash tests, and Professor Lawrence Patrick of Wayne State University personally experienced it. The human body has limits, and in the process of constantly exploring the limits, people find that it is more rational to use corpses.
Professor Lawrence Patrick at work
The professor, with his graduate students, found an abandoned elevator shaft, threw the body down from different heights, and ensured that the corpse's head landed first. The purpose of this is to test the extent to which a car's windshield hurts a human skull.
Experiments have proved that as long as the tempered glass is not too thick, it is difficult to cause brain vibrations, which is a valuable conclusion.
However, corpses are not the perfect solution. For the results of the experiment, it is difficult for the corpse to give an accurate assessment of the survival of the person, and the source of the corpse is mainly based on donations; on the other hand, this behavior is also subject to public pressure and moral condemnation, although it is to save the living life.
The value of pigs other than edibles
Later, animals replaced carcasses. We can see rather magical scenes, a pig is "driving" towards the wall, or an orangutan is "driving" and a dog "driving" the car collides... Animal protection activists naturally do not allow such experiments to occur, and car crash tests are facing new public pressure.
Resistance by animal protection groups
Finally, the dummy debuted. The original dummy served the Air Force's test program at the time, which developed experimental dummies to test newly developed ejection seats, and the technology was also used in automobile crash testing as it matured. The arrival of the dummy finally solved the public opinion pressure brought by the corpses and animals, and also saved the personal safety of the experimenters, which is an experimental equipment that can be used for a long time.
Dummies of different sizes
At this point, I have to sigh and finally get on the right track. Subsequent experimental dummies introduced sensors, and gradually as we see today, they can bring effective and comprehensive data support for crash tests, but the cost of dummies is still not cheap.
Rusty Haight at work
In fact, there are still real people who voluntarily conduct car crash tests, Rusty Haight is one of them, the significance of his work is to be able to accurately describe the physical sensation when the impact, of course, some of the overly sinister experiments are done by dummies.
The "wild road" turned right
Before 1978, there was no clear regulatory standard for automobile crash testing, and the U.S. Highway Safety Administration took the lead in creating the first new car evaluation procedure, which is the beginning of the world. Subsequently, with the development of the automobile industry in other regions, relevant institutions have been established in various places to promulgate corresponding rules.
IIHS tests pedestrian protection systems for vehicles
For example, the American Highway Safety Insurance Association (IIHS), which we often see in the news, was established in 1992 and introduced the concept of rating, the European New Car Safety Evaluation Association E-NCAP issued the safety standards applicable to the European Union in 1996, the domestic C-NCAP was established in 2006, the China Insurance Research Institute was established in 2015 and the C-IASI test standard was issued in 2018.
Zhongbao Research Institute conducted a 25% driver side bias collision
The crash test standards of each region and country are different, which is determined by factors such as traffic laws and social environment in various regions. The development of China's automobile industry started relatively late, so C-NCAP and China Insurance Research Institute borrowed from NTHSA and IIHS respectively. C-NCAP is jokingly called "five-star wholesale department" by netizens, because the proportion of cars that get C-NCAP five-star ratings is very high, indeed, C-NCAP is slightly looser on the rules compared to E-NCAP, coupled with some of the sayings on the Internet, making its credibility catch up with the later China Insurance Research Institute. The same car has completely different results in the two institutions, and I don't say that everyone knows about this matter.
To say something off-topic: Originally I wrote this article to share with you interesting facts in the history of car collisions, but later I found that the topic of safety should still be taken seriously. Compared with the past, today's cars, whether active safety or passive safety, have a huge improvement, but this does not mean that drivers, passengers or even every traffic participant can relax their nerves. Even with the rapid development of technology today, we will still see a lot of disasters caused by driving assistance, it can be seen that vehicle safety is the last insurance, first of all, we must first sort out our own safety awareness.