I routinely see incredibly light weight autos (F1, CART) run into things at up to 200 MPH without damage to the driver.
Cars can be made light and strong. You just need to work at it.
Anything you can do to a light car to make it better, I can do to a heavier car to make it even better yet. You can't ignore the laws of physics. You run one of those 200 mph cars straight into a barrier (as is required for passenger vehicle safety tests) and tell me how safe it is. I would rather ride a Cadillac De ville into a 35 mph barrier, than an Indi car.
Ask yourself what an F1 car costs, and then ask yourself if you really want to pay for that technology in your daily driver. I have a light car (3132 lb) that is fairly strong, but it was expensive - more than most people want to pay.
It's not just a matter of being strong. One of the things that kills people is rapid acceleration. When a heavy object strikes a light object, the light object experiences much more acceleration. That's an unavoidable fact of Newtonian physics.
Guess how much that costs
I see you learned what little you know about cars from TV:
Have you noticed that no F1 or CART cars carry passengers, that they get around 4 m.p.g., and that they don't meet ANY NHTSA safety standards???
And how would you like to pay as much as an F1 car costs???
Stick to whatever it is you know.
As far as CART or Indy cars go, again, much of the improvements in safety have to do with improvements in track safety, not car safety (although there certainly have been improvements in car safety). Indy's SAFER barrier (now installed at every major oval track in the nation) was a tremendous leap forward in improving track and driver safety--but again, it wasn't a car development. Even with the SAFER barrier, Tony Renna was still killed during practice at Indy in 2003.
Racing has done a great job at making racing safer, but it's not really because the cars themselves are safer--it's developing technology that makes the race itself safer, not the car: four point seat belts, HANS system, fireproof racing suits, tires that are cabled to the car, SAFER barrier, etc.
Lightweight cars equal more injuries. That's just all there is to it.
I routinely see incredibly light weight autos (F1, CART) run into things at up to 200 MPH without damage to the driver.
Cars can be made light and strong. You just need to work at it.
But thanks for your technical wisdom just the same.
Cars can be made light and strong. You just need to work at it.
The problem is that these cars are constructed a lot like crash helmets, in that they're designed to protect their contents exactly ONE time. They rely on crush zones and exotic materials to redirect the force away from the contents to dissapate the energy. If a motorcycle helmet falls off the seat of your motorcycle hitting the floor, there's a good chance that the protective EPS has been damaged, and every manufacturer recommends sending the helmet back for a "check up" after even the smallest impact. When one of these vehicles crash, some of the parts are reusable, but it usually requires a major rebuild and most of the passenger components need to be replaced.
Ever notice when there's a crash in F1 or Indy, the car usually breaks apart and the engine compartment often separates from the passenger components, all the while shedding parts? That's one of the ways these cars dissapate the energy of impact. While this could certainly be applied to passenger cars, do you think that you'd ever be able to afford collision insurance on a car that needs to be replaced after a 20MPH impact?
Mark