How Safe Is Your Car!!!!

[InSoMnIa]

found this on another site, if you read the description you'll see that it was a women driver again that mangled this car.

A friend of a friend had a lucky escape from a very nasty accident a month or so ago. I was very interested to see the pictures he took of her car at the recovery yard, not just because I attend accidents fairly regularly with the fire service but because the car was identical to mine (a 2004 Renault Clio Extreme 3). I say was identical to mine... as the pictures show it got somewhat mangled when she left a national speed limit road and ended up rolling end-over-end into a field, landing upside down!
Prior to buying her Clio she was driving a much older car (1990 or thereabouts) and needless to say had she been in that rather than the Clio I might be telling a somewhat more sombre story. After some of the things I've seen in the fire service, and hearing stories like this, I personally plan to make the euro ncap rating a major factor in my decision-making whenever I buy a new car in the future and I hope a lot of other people do the same nowdays... Hopefully buyers voting with their wallets will make the few remaining manufacturers of horrendously unsafe vehicles re-think their strategy - the latest euro ncap results reveal that there are still new cars occasionally scoring as little as One and a Half Stars in the tests!

Which made me wonder what is the ncap rating on the clio

 

[black kro]

I think it's a 3 star

it looks bad, but front passenger bit still intact!

 

[Gareth]

that's the exact car my gf has, we use it as our daily drive, pretty scary, one of the main reasons why I decided to chop in my 172 and go for the Megane, especially with me being 6ft 3, i didn't fancy rolling it with the headroom (not that I'm planning on rolling my car).

 

[MATT BLACK]

Thats nothing - ive seen worse in which people have survived

The car is designed to encage the passengers and protect them - it does it pretty well, as we get some very badly damaged cars were i work and 99% of the owners seem to have survived. The shell has about 40 crumple zones and its designed to absorb the impact whilst caging all the passengers.

PS - the front airbags only deploy in a front end impact - if the car was rolled the seat belt pre-tensioners will have activated strapping the driver and passengers to there seats ( when a pretensioner goes off it yanks the seatbelt down 4 inches which pins you to your seat ). The rear seatbelts also lock up, strapping the rear passengers in as well. More than likely the seat airbags will have gone off protecting them from a side impact. If it had roof airbags they would go off as well in a roll.

On the whole i would say everyone walked from that car

 

[Ibanezman]

Woah, the bottom picture has turned it into a Ford Ka, I always wondered how they designed that

 

[Ex-User (19928)]

Clio's are 4 stars. But the star rating is only within that catergory of size.

So an NCAP 1 star rating on a tank will still probably be safer than a Go kart with 5 stars.

At the end of the day, crashes like that are rare, but if you want a "safe" car, then buy something big, slow and heavy, then install a roll cage and harness and you will live should you get blown up by an anti-armour missile.

 

[FlameR]

You don't buy a french car if you want a 5 star safety rating.

 

[Scudetto]

You don't buy a french car if you want a 5 star safety rating.

I thought most of the Renault range were now 5-star cars?

g

 

[Gareth]

You don't buy a french car if you want a 5 star safety rating.

I thought most of the Renault range were now 5-star cars?

g

Agreed.

 

[Tom]

You don't buy a french car if you want a 5 star safety rating.

I thought most of the Renault range were now 5-star cars?

g

They are.

So that was a silly uninformed thing to say.

NCAP only tests for certain things that happen in the most common of road incidents.

Mk1
http://www.euroncap.com/content/safety_ratings/details.php?id1=1&id2=10

Mk2
http://www.euroncap.com/content/safety_ratings/details.php?id1=1&id2=64

Mk3
http://www.euroncap.com/content/safety_ratings/details.php?id1=1&id2=220

 

[Scudetto]

I think that some of the Peugeots and Citroens are getting big N-cap licks, too.

g

 

[Josh@Renparts]

You don't buy a french car if you want a 5 star safety rating.

I thought most of the Renault range were now 5-star cars?

g

renault were the 1st manufacturer to have all the model range 5 stars..

 

[ForceIndia]

I remember reading that there's a swedish institute that records real world accidents ( ie no of injuries/ deaths) for individual cars, and that NCAP doesn't always help because a lot of fatalities involve side impacts which is only tested quite lightly by NCAP.

 

[FlameR]

I thought most of the Renault range were now 5-star cars?

g

They are.

So that was a silly uninformed thing to say.

NCAP only tests for certain things that happen in the most common of road incidents.

Mk1
http://www.euroncap.com/content/safety_ratings/details.php?id1=1&id2=10

Mk2
http://www.euroncap.com/content/safety_ratings/details.php?id1=1&id2=64

Mk3
http://www.euroncap.com/content/safety_ratings/details.php?id1=1&id2=220

Did I say just Renaults or did I say French cars? It was a generalisation, and an opinion of which the majority hold. I've had 3 french cars, and the build quality in comparison to some other cars is pretty poor. Obviously the build quality effects the safety of the driver, therefore it wasn't a silly uninformed thing to say.

 

[Scudetto]

But Renault is a French car, so in the context of your statement, it was a perfectly fair comment to make.

And without wanting to split hairs, Hondas and Toyotas or the 80s and 90s had perceived high build quality...and lousy crash safety. So there isn't always a link between build quality and actual crash performance, but I see the point you're making.

g

 

[Tom]

http://www.euroncap.com/index.php

Go and count the five stars.

Tell me which manufacturers have the most.
Now tell me where they are based.

(i will give you a clue, the answer is france)

 

[FlameR]

Yeah Renault are a lot better than some other french cars, especially now anyway. Safety is on the up. I heard that citeron VTRs and VTS' are really poor when in a crash!!

 

[Scudetto]

I remember reading that there's a swedish institute that records real world accidents ( ie no of injuries/ deaths) for individual cars, and that NCAP doesn't always help because a lot of fatalities involve side impacts which is only tested quite lightly by NCAP.

Indeed, NCAP results should be viewed in the context of other industry results (if you can bothered to do this. Personally, I can't). I *think* the Swedish company is called Folksam, an insurance company, and it lists injuries and fatalites per '000 cars, IIRC. Its results are usually typical of NCAP's findings (ie it's the five star cars look after you), but odd results slips in now and then...like the R5 being safer than the Clio in some cases. This might be a statistics thing, but as I'm an idiot and not a statistician, I'm not able to explain why this is.

The American Institute of Highway Loss (IIRC) produces some similar data.

Again, it's interesting to view this data to see whether the NCAP lab tests have any bearing in real life. To a degree, it seems that they do.

g

 

[Englebert]

Wow, i think you've beaten your normal 4 posts per year quota there.

Time to hide again?

-Rob

 

[Phill1978]

some have you have lost your minds or are newbies. Renaults are now very very safe.

the new espace has been seen as dangerous for older cars as its so tough in a crash.

oter than a volvo or a modern mercedes your as safe in a new renault as anything else on the roads if not much safer.

 

[Neil G]

Agree with the above...Renault are scoring pretty well in the safety stakes thses days

 

[gazcaddy]

Renault are one of the best where safety is involved.

 

[DrR]

Thing is, does reanults safety features still work after a few years? Also that clio looks like a ford KA now

 

[Toypop]

The NCAP tests involve a crash at 40mph head on into a deformable object and a light side impact test.

These tests do more harm that good because they lead people to believe they are safe in their cars - and that makes them drive like c*cks.

A 40mph crash into a stationary object is obviously lighter than hitting another car head on in a residential area with a closing speed of 60mph. Also the object used in the tests is deformable - something that a big tree is not. Plus the tree is a lot narrower than the test object so the energy is focused on a smaller area of the car.

Basically the test simulates crashing into the back of a parked vehicle at 40mph which is a very narrow test indeed.

Cars that pass the test won't save you when you crash off a country road into a tree at 60mph or as I said hit a car head-on on pretty much any road. However cars that pass the test will cause you significantly more whiplash injuries in slower speed shunts compared with an older car.

 

[Scudetto]

No, the test simulates hitting a car of equivalent weight in an offset collision, the most common of all accidents that lead to injury. An offset collision is even more demanding that a 100% head-on, as it concentrates the load on a smaller area. The barrier is deformable not to make test easier; in fact, the deformable bit crushes in conjunction with the car, just as it would in a crumple zone to crumple zone crash; but, when the crumple zone is exhausted, the car's structure then has to resist the barrier's 'hard points', which in the real world, could well be the engine of the other vehicle.

You're right in saying it doesn't replicate an impact with a tree and that it's a narrow test; that's because they cannot afford to crash test for every single eventuality.

The Pole test is not a breeze either; again, that concentrates a high-load over a small area which is pretty difficult to engineer for. If a car were a human, it would be like you being wacked in one place (flippin' hard) with a Golf club.

Finally, people will drive like c***s because they are c***s in most situations, not just coz they're in an NCAP tested car.

g