In The Crash (1970)

[music] I suppose you could say this is just another film about highway safety. Well, it is. But if you're like most people, highway safety may be limited to accident prevention, keeping drunks from behind the wheel, getting people to try to avoid having collisions, better driver licensing procedures. In short, ways to stop crashes from happening before they start. Certainly, these are an important part of highway loss reduction. But the fact is that crashes do occur. So, what about the people named and killed in those crashes? Whether they were to blame like the drunks or were blameless like the people the drunks hit. And what about the staggering economic loss that we all are paying for in millions of major and minor crashes each year? That's what this film is about. It's a film about highway safety, but not about how to prevent people from getting into accidents. Instead, it's about how to protect people and their property from damage in the crash. [music] I'm Ben Kelly from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. And maybe by this time you're saying to yourself, well, why bother with what happens in the crash? Why not just concentrate on stopping people from getting into accidents in the first place? That's a fair question. It's one you answer, by the way, every time you ship a fragile wedding gift or Christmas present. Now, take this delicate piece of glassear. Now, let's suppose you want to ship this to your aunt Minnie somewhere across the country. You could pack it unprotected like this in a flimsy box and hope that no one in the post office department happens to drop it. But sometimes people do drop things. So what will you do with your next fragile shipment? Change human behavior perhaps by launching a national campaign against package droppers. Or you could improve your package so that even if it does get dropped, the contents will be protected from harm. You cushion the glassware in a damager resistant, energyabsorbing box like this. In short, [music] you make a better crash package. What works for glassware can work for people and their cars, too. You see, the glassware didn't have to break. And people who can take much more of a crash than you'd imagine don't have to be killed or even injured or even have their cars crumpled just because they get involved in a big or a little crash if their four-w wheeled packages are properly designed. First, the content should be tied down. Otherwise, they can smash about or get thrown out like these test dummies. Part of packaging people is to anchor them down with restraint systems, test proven safety seats for small children, lap belts for added protection, shoulder harnesses like this volunteer is wearing on a crash sled at Hollowman Air Force Base. In a European survey of crashes at speeds up to 60 mph, nobody wearing lap and shoulder belts was killed. But despite years of buckle up campaigns, the fact is too many of us still don't and probably won't. [music] [music] >> [music] >> Reliable crash protection can't depend on human cooperation. It has to be built into the car and it has to work when it's needed, automatically. The idea of the airbag has been around for more than a decade. Now, it's being perfected by many car makers. Sensors trigger the bag the instant a serious crash approaches or starts. In hundreds of a second, gas under pressure inflates the bag. That's less than the blink of an eye, shown here in slow motion. Moments later, the crash is over and the airbag is deflated. One system was tested successfully against misfiring on 2 million miles of road. Airbags can be installed in dashboards, steering wheels, and for rear passengers, seatbacks. This is one kind of built-in crash protection too often overlooked in the rhetoric of traditional accident prevention that government first moved to inject into car design in 1966. The National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act, which was passed by Congress in that year, directs the US Department of Transportation to establish minimum levels of safety performance for all new motor vehicles, including crash protection performance. These safety belts, they're required by the federal standards. And how your car's other components perform in a crash, that's covered by the standards, too. Now, take these two windshields. They looked the same when they were new, but they didn't act the same under crash conditions. Now, this kind was made prior to the federal standards. They called it safety glass. But if your head hit it in a crash, turns out it wasn't so safe after all. These jagged edges could play havoc with heads and necks, and did for many years, killing and scarring tens of thousands of people. But this laminated kind, now required on all new cars, tends to cushion impact. It's sort of like a fire net catching a person plummeting from a burning building. By the way, some of the old style windshields could pop out in a crash, meaning you could pop out right behind at 70 or 80 mph head first into the pavement. But these new kind must stay in place in the crash. The fire net must be there to protect you when you need it. The federal requirements mean that this dashboard is covered with padding and behind that energy absorbing structure to cushion your impact. Control knobs rounded and recessed so they'll be less likely to stab you in a crash. This door, sturdy hinges and a lock mean that it won't fly open in a crash so that you'll fly out. And this steering column, if you're thrown against it in a crash here, it's designed to give down here. That means that instead of stabbing you in the chest like a spear, it will gently and protectively absorb the energy of your crash forces. And the steering wheel, that's designed to absorb your crash forces, too. You know, if something like this had been built into steering columns from the beginnings of automobile design, the lives of some third of a million Americans who died crushed or impaled on their steering columns might have been saved. Take this seat. That's covered by federal standards, too. Now, in a crash, the seat must stay securely anchored in place, and the seat back must stay locked in position so it can't hurtle forward to crush you. And this headrest, that's covered by federal standards, too. By the way, did you ever try to rest your head on one of these things? If you did, you know that that's not what they're for. If you're hit from behind, a very common kind of crash, the results can be the neck and spine injuries called whiplash. These tests at Wayne State University simulate 10 mph rearenders. With a headrest, actually called a head restraint, this volunteer received no injury. At 23 m an hour, the unrestrained dumy's head is more severely whipped. But even when rammed at 44 m an hour, simulated here, the volunteers protected head experiences no whiplash. Some head restraints are built right into the seat. They don't need to be adjusted, but others, like this one, have to be positioned before you use them. Otherwise, they won't help and they may hurt when you have a crash. The important thing to remember, position your head restraint directly behind your head so that it will catch it like this in a crash. A man can hit a wall at 5 m an hour without hurting himself. Can your car do that? How about 10 or 15? [music] [music] >> [music] [music] [music] [music] >> It's small consolation. But your wife wasn't lying when she gave you the $600 repair bill and insisted she was only going 10 m an hour. We pay twice for such exterior delicacies as recessed bumpers, cosmetic chrome, sheet metal sculpture. First when we buy them and again when they crumple in what are politely referred to as fender benders. [music] We pay as a nation, too. Because of low-speed collisions, car owners and insurance companies are forced to pay billions a year to repair eggshell cars. And who can [music] guess the cost in clogged court dockets, diverted police services, and the waste of raw materials for replacement parts? And what's so sad is that it doesn't need to be that way. This bumper uses water to lessen damage in low-speed collisions. This one also reduces damage at higher speeds. It's mounted on a shock absorbing system that uses techniques developed for aircraft landing gear. The 9-in shock arms are shown here supporting a special test bumper. This is what happens with standard bumpers at about 25 m an hour. Now, the cars are equipped with the energy absorbing bumper system. New cars could be equipped with these for much less than the cost of a 5 mph crash. In the high-speed crashes so common place on today's superighways, crash packaging improvement is a matter of life and death. A crash into a rigid signpost like this one at 56 mph can kill everyone in the car. So engineers are perfecting a hinge-like front end that absorbs severe crash forces and safely separates passengers from immovable objects. The crash is ended and the hinge has kept the passenger compartment intact. This front-end frame is being developed under a program that recognizes that how your car is designed and built helps determine how much human and property damage takes place when it crashes. Another determinant, how your car's size and weight compare to the size, weight, and rigidity of things your car hits or that hit it. That's why in a crash, small car occupants are exposed to a much greater risk of death and injury than occupants of larger cars. In these crashes, the cars are going 30 m an hour. Their impact speeds are the same. Their damage clearly isn't, nor is it in real life crashes. Crash data were analyzed in New York State by weight of cars ranging from very lightweight models of less than 2,000 lb through the standard cars averaging 3,400 lb to heavy models such as luxury cars averaging 4,800 lb. According to the US Department of Transportation, in the heaviest cars, death or serious injury occurred in three out of every 100 crashes. For the mediumweight models, it rose to five out of every hundred crashes. And for the very [clears throat] light cars, death or serious injury occurred in almost 10 out of every 100 crashes, more than triple the rate for the heaviest cars and almost twice that for cars of average weight. What your car crashes with, of course, isn't always another car. Sometimes it's a hazard that nature or man has placed in the environment through which you drive. a tree, a signpost, a pointed guard rail, a bridge abutment, even a ditch. Far better crash design along the road, just like far better crash design of your vehicle, depends on gently dissipating the energy released in the crash over enough time and space so that its potential for damaging you and your car is greatly reduced or eliminated. That's one car after a signpost tore it in two. Humane design would have prevented the deaths in this crash on an interstate highway. Breakaway poles such as these being demonstrated at Texas Transportation Institute have been a design reality for years. They're cheap, easy to build, and they save lives. In a group of collisions with breakaway poles along a Louisiana freeway at 60 m an hour or more, no one was killed and 38% of the cars were driven away under their own power. Yet most poles you see along even the most modern looking superighways aren't built to break away on impact. They're built to stand fast and they kill. These little triangular islands at high-speed highway exits are treacherous if you hit the rigid signposts, bridge abutments, or other booby traps often placed there by inept highway engineering. Texas Transportation Institute has tested a variety of protective systems for installation at these gore areas. One uses water to take up shock. Another absorbs the crash with a honeycomb of vermiculite concrete. A third, one already in use at a few selected high crash sites in Texas, uses a strategic arrangement of common oil drums to cushion crashing cars. Yet another slows the car with a system of specially designed cylinders weighted with sand. A guardrail is supposed to guard your life. All too often, it's really a booby trap that does this. If the pointed end of the guardrail is flared and buried, it will guide your car to a safe stop instead of spearing it and you. The rail can also be mounted on shockabsorbing pistons. In a crash, conventional bridge sighting can destroy your car. Wouldn't you rather hit this kind? Highway engineers have known about this for years. Yet, on how many bridges do you see it? They've also known about such lifesavers as chainlink fencing along roadsides and in median strips. Crashing cars can even be stopped the way we stop jets on aircraft carriers. Cars that can crash without killing or injuring their occupants or even picking your pocket in needless cosmetic repair costs. a roadside environment that forgives drivers who stray or get forced off the traveled right ofway instead of sentencing them to death and destruction. Are these really such a radical departure from the way that people have been protecting themselves and their property from hazards of other kinds? Or is it just that we've neglected them in our preoccupation with only trying to stop people from getting into crashes in the first place? The truth is that ways to dramatically reduce losses in crashes have been known and available for a long time, but inexcusably they have not been vigorously applied to vehicle and road design. Now, some of the crash protection features that you've seen in this film are routinely found on vehicles, whether because of federal standards, government and private research, or manufacturer initiative. But a great deal more can be done. Enough more to save each year tens of thousands of lives, millions of cripplings and scarrings, and to stop tens of billions of dollars in national economic waste. Imagine a world in which airplanes had to be repaired after every landing because their landing gears couldn't withstand the jolt of touchdown. A world in which every dropped package meant broken contents. A world in which every football player who got tackled or blocked at more than 15 miles an hour ended up in the hospital or in the morg. No one of us would tolerate those kinds of losses. Now imagine a world in which cars still crashed, but usually with little or no damage to themselves or to their occupants. The world you've glimpsed in this film. Why should we tolerate anything less? The traditional emphasis of highway safety organizations has recognized one piece of the highway loss problem, that of trying to stop human behavior from getting people into crashes. But it is overlooked the piece that modern vehicle crash design and modern highway crash design can most effectively and quickly come to grips with. the crash itself. It is time for society to decide to promote and demand nothing less than vehicle packages and roadside environments that protect people and their property in the crash. [music] [music] >> [music] >> Hey, [music] [bell] [music] Heat. Heat. 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