[s-cars] Teen cars Mine vs UrS4 .. Who wins?

[Brett Dikeman]

On Wed, Dec 9, 2009 at 10:44 AM, LL - NY <larrycleung at gmail.com> wrote:

> Mass wins.

No, lowest maximum acceleration of internal organs wins.  There are
known typical limits for how much acceleration the human body can
take.  Have you seen the videos of Chinese-made vehicles?  They
practically fall apart.  They weigh about the same as the vehicles
they're cribbed off of:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vAN2cx2UIE
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3363869073309161115

On the opposite end, we have F1 drivers who routinely walk away from
serious crashes because their cars do a fantastic job of managing the
impact.

The important things are:
1)Preventing intrusion into the passenger compartment
2)Energy absorption.

Head-on crashes are amongst the safest because everything happens the
way it's intended to- the most impact area for the car to absorb
energy with, the seatbelts hold you, and there's lots of room in front
of you in the compartment.  The dangerous ones are the side-impact
collisions and offset crashes, and the really fatal ones are tree
hits.  Remember this?  It's a miracle the driver walked away.
http://forums.vwvortex.com/zerothread?id=3105304

There's an old thread somewhere of an S2 coupe in Portugal where the
driver and passenger were not nearly as lucky (and the car was in
about 30 pieces, not 2.)

I'll take the Mini over the C4 any day; the C4 had abysmal crash-test
ratings even back in the day.  In general people seem to be waaaaay
over-impressed with the crash-worthiness of Audis pre-late-90's.  I've
seen photos of 200q20v avants that rolled, and the car wasn't taller
than the doorhandles afterwards.

Put your kid in something German made after '97, and something Asian
made after 2000-2002 or so.

-B