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safety philosophy Posted by Snowmobile [Email]  (#686)  [Profile/Gallery]
(more from Snowmobile) on Sun, 9 Jun 2013 21:23:26
In Reply to: Re: you may just get that argument, here on SAABnet, dtechakacheaptech, Sun, 9 Jun 2013 15:00:21 Members do not see ads below this line. - Help Keep This Site Online - Signup |
crosstour is funny - it looks quite a bit like a car, in the spirit of the 9000 almost (but not as nice lines at the rear - the late model 9000 really got that right! looks 99% like a sedan, opens as a cavernous hatch)... but it is actually classed as a small SUV! I wouldn't have guessed that from just a passing look (there's one frequently parked on a route I pass in our neighbourhood). I guess it's not unlike that BMW "hatch" SUV, but not as extreme... the 3 series GT hatch looks kind of neat though...
In terms of safety, perhaps what AeroEd was getting at is the philosophy behind it. The 9000 for it's time was as safe as anything. Saab was a very early adopter of ABS and airbags, but I own older Saabs with and without both, and the older saabs without airbags were designed with interiors that would absorb impacts... sure an airbag is better, but for the time, they were very safe cars... the non-ABS car still has fantastic brakes - much better than many ABS cars of today - just need to learn how to threshold brake! technology marches on with time, so it is kind of unfair to compare a 1986 9000 with a 2012 SUV in terms of passive safety. stuff like SUV side impact, and more recently 25% frontal overlap testing have made the newest cars designed to be more safe than their predecessors...
*but* wrt philosophy, most companies design to pass the test for marketing reasons... the swedes design to be good pretty much regardless of what iihs is doing + instead test to meet their own more extensive safety programs. The 9000 was a case in point, where it's side incompatibility with SUVs lead to the 9-5, and the iihs test... the 9-3ss was the first car to get 5 stars in that iihs test even though it was introduced before the test. It was designed to be safe, not just past the test, whereas all other manufacturers either failed the test, or withheld cars from testing pending redesign (to pass the test)... Volvo was the next closest back then...
Once again, with the low offset frontal testing happening now, almost nobody could pass the test with the existing models, withheld cars from testing etc etc, except Volvo. They aced it on the S60 and XC60 even though they've been on the market a while... Probably they've been running tests like that for a number of years prior to iihs... I bet Saab was too... they knew exactly how the car would perform in the iihs test... interestingly Honda was the other manufacturer to get 2013 cars to pass that test - it was widely known that iihs was considering adding this test and they worked up the new models to do well. I think Honda has really upped their game wrt safety (as has everyone, cars in general are much better today than 2 decades ago), but I'm not sure they quite have the same philosophical approach as the Swedes... but if the end result is there, good for them!
I guess my point - number of airbags does not really matter. Was the car designed to be safe in the real world? I'd rather be in a 9-5 with no side curtains, than many of the cars with side curtains that don't have as good a side structure (folding B pillar)... what happens if the airbags fail to deploy? That folding B pillar is always there... in something that only relies on the airbags, you might not survive if they fail to deploy... airbags are good, but not a panacea. in many cases, they are used as an easy way to pass a test...
Headrests is another interesting topic wrt safety. SAHR in the 9-5 is better than the headrests in a c900... but it is important to note that the headrests in the c900 were designed to fit low on the head and compress to reduce whiplash... SAHR is better, but they are good. All manufacturers now do something along the lines of SAHR, but the headrests are 1) uncomfortable, 2) barely adjustable, 3) huge to the point of blocking vision, imho, a greater safety risk than whiplash. The headrests in the og 9-5, and even more so the c900 allow much better vision - the most important thing for safety when driving a car... yet iihs would deem the c900 headrests "poor" because they fail the test, which is a simple measurement of height (even if they provide better real world safety than other tall non-active headrests that pass the measurement test)...
New cars are getting safer and safer, but it's not as black and white as the marketing folks would have us believe. I'd rather support the manufacturers who value real life safety in their designs for 2 reasons: 1) the cars will perform better in "unusual" crashes (eg does anyone other than Saab and Volvo crash the cars into moose?), and 2) supporting future safety R+D has value.
->Posting last edited on Sun, 9 Jun 2013 21:42:02.
, Fri, 7 Jun 2013 20:18:40, Sun, 9 Jun 2013 21:23:26 <-- Viewing This Message
, Mon, 10 Jun 2013 07:50:53, Tue, 11 Jun 2013 03:34:52, Tue, 11 Jun 2013 10:29:41, Sat, 29 Jun 2013 19:06:24, Tue, 11 Jun 2013 09:44:54
, Sat, 8 Jun 2013 00:47:18
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