>>It was a little after 7 p.m. and Ricardo Marcos was rolling through the darkness in his gray Hyundai Elantra. Marcos had spent a long day toiling as a mechanic at a trucking company in McAllen, Texas, a sunbaked city nestled right on the U.S.-Mexico border.
Reading the opening story, it sounds like he fell asleep or wasn't paying attention. We will never know, but it's very sad no matter. It's also true, assuming he fell asleep, he could have killed others, as happened to Rod Bramblett and his wife, radio announcer for the Auburn Tigers, who was killed at a stoplight when rear ended by a driver who fell asleep while driving at a high rate of speed. Another sad story.
Hitting an 80,000lb mass in any configuration at high speed is going to be nasty no matter what. One option is to ask truckers to provide heavy bumpers and crumple zones and airbags around their trucks. The other option is to operate your vehicle safely, reducing speed if visibility is limited, etc.
I dont doubt that rear bumpers being stronger would be a good start, but by the same token, the starting assumption of a car rear ending a very large object at 60mph head-on does not seem like a scenario to weigh too heavily in the grand scheme.
However, maybe there is a compromise of better rear guards and 20% additional side coverage by guards? i.e. dont make perfect the enemy of good.
The purpose of the NHTSA and vehicle safety regulations broadly is not to litigate who is at fault in an accident and sentence them to death, it is to make traveling on the road by motor vehicle or bicycle or foot as safe as is feasible given costs and available technology and data about the nature of injuries in collisions. Most people most of the time are in control of their vehicles and are paying attention to the road. But every single person that drives a car will make a mistake, become distracted, suffer a mechanical failure, or become unavoidably implicated in the mistake of another road user.
Slamming into the back or coming through the side of a semi-trailer is not something that just happens to "dangerous drivers". It is something that can happen to anyone placed in the wrong place at the wrong time.
That said, the position of the regulators and trucking industry at present make sense, underride crash data indicates that the costs of proposed safety measures could be better spent improving other known road-safety issues with known or projected solutions. And the point that TFA is making is that NHTSA data is severely underreporting underride crash incidents in the sample that they investigated, making underride crash safety regulations worthwhile.
And the mass of the vehicle is really not the issue in this sort of collision. This type of collision would occur in the same exact way if the trailers weighed 1,000 lbs, the bottom of the trailer would shred through the windshield and decapitate the occupants. A better underride guard would turn an unknown number of fatal accidents into scary crashes that people walk away from unharmed.
Sorry, saying mass doesn't matter is a false assertion. A 1000lb trailer will absolutely react differently in this scenario, including getting pushed up and out or yielding/crushing.
NHTSA also has to weigh the cost of compliance. Cars also could have stronger A pillars, that way the burden of compliance is placed on the one at higher risk.
The article tries to make it a big conspiracy by Big Truck, that bothered me. Trucks are easy to hate on, but efficient transport over very long distances is a tremendous strength of the American economy.
> The article tries to make it a big conspiracy by Big Truck, that bothered me.
I mean, one of the people who sued uncovered evidence of a literal conspiracy to hide safety-related data, so I'm not sure why the article's framing should bother you.
> Cars also could have stronger A pillars, that way the burden of compliance is placed on the one at higher risk.
That's not a completely unreasonable take, but my position is that the thing that causes the damage -- the trailer -- should be required to be made less lethal.
It's also unclear that A pillars can be made strong enough to survive those situations anyway. And even if they can, the car's crumple zones (which absorb kinetic energy) won't end up getting "used" in this type of crash, so the A pillar will take all the force, stop the car way faster than an impact on crumple zones would, and throw the driver forward much harder than in other types of crashes, possibly still fatally.
The US basically ignores transport efficiency though. Otherwise, there's be shipping on boats within the US
Why not put the burden of compliance of the operators creating the risk?
Otherwise, the trucks will build themselves bigger, such that the improved aframes are no longer sufficient. Somebody walking around with a bomb doesn't make it reasonable for everyone else to have to bomb proof everything
> Slamming into the back or coming through the side of a semi-trailer is not something that just happens to "dangerous drivers". It is something that can happen to anyone placed in the wrong place at the wrong time.
It's certainly an avoidable mistake, especially on an open highway where the trailer was 'edging slowly' out into traffic. Failing to avoid it results in danger. The article doesn't even mention extenuating circumstances such as a blind turn or something, but even if that were the case, the situation would simply require extra caution to successfully navigate the dangerous area.
"Dangerous" doesn't have to mean intentionally so or that the driver was reckless; the danger could simply be in lacking the experience to recognize the danger that exists.
Reading the opening story, it sounds like he fell asleep or wasn't paying attention. We will never know, but it's very sad no matter. It's also true, assuming he fell asleep, he could have killed others, as happened to Rod Bramblett and his wife, radio announcer for the Auburn Tigers, who was killed at a stoplight when rear ended by a driver who fell asleep while driving at a high rate of speed. Another sad story.
Hitting an 80,000lb mass in any configuration at high speed is going to be nasty no matter what. One option is to ask truckers to provide heavy bumpers and crumple zones and airbags around their trucks. The other option is to operate your vehicle safely, reducing speed if visibility is limited, etc.
I dont doubt that rear bumpers being stronger would be a good start, but by the same token, the starting assumption of a car rear ending a very large object at 60mph head-on does not seem like a scenario to weigh too heavily in the grand scheme.
However, maybe there is a compromise of better rear guards and 20% additional side coverage by guards? i.e. dont make perfect the enemy of good.