Welcome back to Comment Of The Day! Every day, we read every single comment posted on our site and pick the one that made us laugh, get informed, or feel warm inside. You don’t have to go into our comments sections and write thousand-word stories about why you love a car so much, but a lot of you do, and that means a lot to us. So we’re highlighting some of the most excellent bits of thought that you’ve formed into words and digitized onto our website. Anyway, I shouldn’t be writing this post, because my garage just flooded due to a burst pipe, and all my tools/car parts are actively freezing to the garage floor. In truth, I’m not that worried, because I’m certain that, so long as I can crack the ice into small enough pieces, those pieces should lift right up off the garage floor given that the concrete is completely saturated with oil. That ice won’t be sticking on there very well. Still, I’d rather not have to use a hammer and pick to pack for my move to LA, so I really ought to pick those tools up, like, right now.
But Comment of the Day ain’t gonna write itself (well, it is, but the article about the comment of the day won’t), so let’s give some love to — or, in this case, let’s poke some fun at — readers hugh crawford and BolognaBurrito, who, upon seeing how strenuous the IIHS’s Small Overlap Rigid Barrier (SORB) test — which involves the very outer 25 percent of the vehicle’s front end hitting a rigid barrier, thus replicating a crash between two vehicles driving towards one another but only just hitting one another — asked themselves: Would it be better to just hit a car straight on? So does this mean that you should not try to avoid a crash, since doing so could put you in a small overlap crash situation, and instead just lean into it and go full-frontal? This idea is, of course, absolutely ridiculous — so much so that I figured I’d share these comments with you:
hugh crawford acknowledges the ridiculous nature of this question with “That also seems like the definition of a perverse incentive,” and that’s true. Avoiding a crash is obviously the best answer. But what if trying to avoid a crash results in stresses to your car that put occupants in more danger than if the driver hadn’t tried avoiding the crash? I mean “stresses the car” not just by focusing crash energy on a smaller area (stress equals force over area, after all, and in this case we’re talking about 25 percent of the frontal area), but — it’s also worth considering — by possibly rotating the vehicle and inducing a side collision or rollover instead of a frontal collision. (This is why automakers tend to build understeer into cars — so that they crash facing their tree or car or whatever, since the nose of the car is best designed for an impact). And then there’s risk to your surroundings — are there pedestrians or other vehicles that are potentially in your crash-avoidance path? At the same time, leaning into a crash instead of trying to avoid it — for example, hitting an object perpendicularly — can transmit more of your kinetic energy into material destruction than if you hit it at an angle, as some of that entry energy could remain and/or convert to rotational energy (you can see how in some small overlap crash tests, the vehicle continues moving after the test). I think the answer is: You’re probably not going to have time to make a choice, anyway. IIHS’s small overlap test does imply that hitting another car or a rigid barrier with just 25 percent of your car is more strenuous than hitting those objects with 50 percent of your car’s front end or, it follows, with its entire front end. But none of these is better than zero percent of your front end, and that’s likely what you’re instinctively going to reach for; hopefully your car’s stability control can keep you under control during such a swerve. Anyway, I’m looking forward to more discussion on this in the comments. Really though, all accidents are different and I’m sure there’s no hard rule on it. Velocity would also play a large role, obviously. With a small overlap I believe the tendency is to spin off of each other, with full overlap you both expend all of your energy coming to a stop. On the surface that sounds like the worst case scenario but you also have to think of time of impact and how that relates to force, ie: longer time = less force {F=(m*delta-v)/t } It is going to take much longer to come to a full stop than it will to bounce off the other car (inelastic collision.) Again though, not the full story; then you need to take into account the change in velocity after impact (elastic collision.) You would probably need a spreadsheet comparing vehicle weights and speeds and at that point if you need to consult a spreadsheet before you crash into someone something has gone very very wrong. “Still, I’d rather not have to use a hammer and pick” You have salvaged the hammer and pick from the floor, just in case? Or are they stuck to the floor already? Ultimately this is going to require a spreadsheet, vehicle weights, speeds, and a whole host of figures. I went into a bit of it on a reply to CoolDave After the witnesses calmed me down, I asked the idiot why he suddenly stopped in the middle of the intersection. He had no idea why he did. The police came to investigate and determined that he was on medications and shouldn’t be driving at all. My car only needed the new front clip and some repairs, yet the parts were hard to come by and quite expensive. His insurance carrier was a professional arsehole, determining that my Alfa Romeo wasn’t worth anything and offered me the pittance of $800. My father dissuaded me from lawyering up because he was kind of “happy” to see my car damaged. He was fed up with its high maintenance and frequent issues. Instead of using $800 to fix up the car, he took the insurance money and bought me something very reliable, a 1982 Buick Skylard (spelling is intentional), from his company fleet. That put a lot of strain on our father-son relationship for a long time…
