Crash test Chevrolet 1959 vs Chevrolet 2009

[Magibeg]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_ptUrQOMPs

Pretty neat to see. Also find it hilarious how many conspiracy theorists there are on youtube claiming the older car had no engine/weakened frame.... etc etc.

[erocker]

Those conspiracy theorists are morons. They have no idea how a car is designed today.

Old cars were sheet metal built on a flat frame that sits low to the ground.

New cars are built where basically the enire car works as the frame and they are designed to crumple in the front and rear while leaving the passenger compartment intact.

[yogurt_21]

Those conspiracy theorists are morons. They have no idea how a car is designed today.

Old cars were sheet metal built on a flat frame that sits low to the ground.

New cars are built where basically the enire car works as the frame and they are designed to crumple in the front and rear while leaving the passenger compartment intact.

yup witnessed this first hand in my sport trac, passenger compartment was fully intact, rest was trashed. 65mph into center divider while spinning.

besides we're talking 50 years of crash testing and safety improvements this shouldn't be a surprising result.

very curious to see them do trucks

[twilyth]

That was so cool. Thanks. And it didn't even stress my gnat-like attention span.

The old cars had other dangers too. The steering wheel for example had no collapsible section and would act like a spear in the event of a crash. Dashboards were made of metal and could inflict a bad concussion even in a minor crash. Seats had no locks so if you stopped short, the seat backs would come flying forward. And on and on.

[JC316]

The test is slightly biased. That 59 Chevrolet is well known to not have good crash ratings. It's a flat frame, with big hollow fenders and 0 support under there. Now, I would like to see that against say a 64 Galaxy 500XL, or a 76 Cadillac Eldorado, or an 84 Buick Park Avenue.

This is a picture of an old 51 Cadillac Fleetwood project that me and my dad worked on. We were retrofitting a Mark VIII motor into it. The only thing we had done here was we extended the frame rails and and removed the A frames on either side. As you can see, there is a whole lot of nothing under there.

http://i108.photobucket.com/albums/n10/JC316_2006/1951%20Cadillac/engineresized.jpg

And here is what it looked like together.
http://i108.photobucket.com/albums/n10/JC316_2006/1951%20Cadillac/Cadillac.jpg