Here ya go. Two 59 Chevy's danced, both lost. One Impala 2 door, one wagon. From a book i have called "Vintage Car Wrecks" Same general hit area that was just done with the new car vs the 59. Sorry for the poor quality, i took these with my cell phone. Tony
" And that new test was stupid the god darned tree huggers ruined a perfectly good piece of Americana." Or "And that new test was stupid. The corporate interests at the Insurance Ins***ute of America ruined a perfectly good piece of Americana to scare us all into buying new cars." Hippies, as far as I know, have no interest in any of us buying anything new (except maybe Public TV tote bags), and most are likely not smart enough to use the internet.
See how all of these head-on collisions are off-center? It's my guess that that's reason the tests are run that way, not just to make one car look bad. A perfectly centered up head on collision has got to be pretty rare.
On the off center collision this is how most head on impacts happen unless both drivers are driving on the wrong side of the street. I think there is very usefull info in this test. Thank you rustynewyorker you are always full of good info. Moral of the story = DON'T CRASH!
Don't know the speeds involved, but I'm ***uming the '60 Chevy wagon was the vehicle that T-boned the '55 Ford Customline 4 door, so the '55 Ford took a pretty hard side impact from a fairly heavy vehicle and withstood the impact well enough to afford significant protection to the people in the '55 Ford. Just p***ed the scene of a similar wreck in Canton GA on my way home yesterday. Late model midsize 2 door hdtp (don't ask me what make, all the late model stuff looks alike to me) got T boned by another car of comparable size. Driver's door was torn completely off and it looked like the car that hit it entered the p***enger compartment about as far as the console. If the driver survived, which I doubt, he or she is in very bad shape.
The 59 Chevy vs. Malibu crash test looks a little fishy to me. Look at the video of the p***enger front fender of the 59. It shows the right front corner of the front bumper being pulled forward at the time of impact. However, the headlight area of the right front fender is not distorting at this time. The front fender of a 59 Chevy is attached to the bumper at this point with several bolts, (not just sheetmetal screws). Therefore the fender should start to bend at the same time as the bumper. It doesn't do this in the video, so that tells me that there are several bolts that are missing in that area. Also look at the rear edge of the p***enger front fender, where it is bolted to the cowl. In the video, the fender pulls away from the cowl, very quickly. Hmmmm.....Almost like it wasn't even bolted to the cowl? If the p***enger fender wasn't correctly bolted on, you can bet that the driver's side fender wasn't either. As far as an actual accident.....I was in an accident with my 55 Chevy Cameo pickup. This happened in May of 1996. I was driving on a county blacktop road at 55 MPH, (or maybe a little faster ). A fairly new (at the time), Buick ran a stop sign and pulled out from a cross road. My left front fender hit the Buick at 50 MPH, or better, which crumpled the fender and driver's door. However the fibergl*** rear fenders were undamaged, as was the whole p***enger side of the truck. The Cameo's frame was bent though. The left frame rail was shoved back 3 inches. However, my 55 just about tore right through the side of the Buick. Fortunately no one was seriously hurt. Attached are pics of my Cameo from pre-accident, post accident, and the ****py Buick that caused it all.
"Yeah, man, he went out in a blaze of glory. '55 T-Bird . . . Lucky *******!" Seriously, except for the obviously HIGHER-speed crashes shown iN the old black&whites, you WILL notice that the p***enger compartment stays intact. From '54 or '55 onward, seatbelts were offered pretty routinely (even if collapsible steering columns & airbags were years away yet). Myself, I'd take my chances with driving carefully and wearing my seatbelts, RATHER than having an airbag break my neck. Just my 2 cents.
I'm sticking with my theory that the 59 was rusty because of the large puffs of rust coming out from under the car on impact. I drove a 59 Sport Coupe daily driver for many years and it's hard to believe it would fold up like that!
I love old stuff, nothing made anytime recently has any character or p***ion to it. However, late models do do one thing well..protect the occupants. The cars deform everywhere because they're supposed to, to protect the occupants. You don't see or hear of many people today walking around with scars or limps from accidents, like we used to. The cars that we all love were real good at transmitting the crash energy through those rigid frames into the softest part...the humans inside. Somewhere along the line, a decision was made that people were more valuable than machines...most of the time, they're right, but I have met a few that could stand to be replaced by machinery.
It looks like there was a buick dealer on both sides of the street,one had a 57 chevy in the window and the other a 61 buick.
I have one problem with all the new "safety" standards on autos...they come at the expense of visibility... How many people here have been driving their late model and pulled out in front of another car only to have a p***enger scream to stop because the BIG BEEFY "I'll keep you safe" A-Pillar completely obstructs your view? It's happened to me a few times. If you are at the right (or in this case wrong) angle, and a car is coming down a hill it's pretty easy for this scenario to take shape. I've also been surprised by pedestrians that were in the street because of these BIG BEEFY A-Pillars. They are in the road behind traffic that's coming toward you and before you know it, they're in front or next to you...Same thing with the rear views...BIG head restraints for the rear seat p***engers nearly block the whole rear window, BIG B-Pillars and C-Pillars (mostly in SUVs) make checking your blindspot nearly impossible. On the other side, my '55 Fairlane and '60 F100 both have wrap around windshields, and for that, even without seatbelts, I FEEL safer. It just seems like the current mode of thought is "What will happen WHEN this car has an accident?" instead of "How do we keep this car out of an accident?"
There is absolutely no doubt it is way safer to be in the newer car. Let's not kid ourselves folks. Car makers have spent a lot of time and research since 1960 to just do that, to make cars better and safer. They haven't always done a great job specifically here and there, but reality is after 50 years, the average new car is way safer than any 1959-60 car. It is not some kind of conspiracy, just the result of years of learning and experience. For 1 very important thing, new cars are meant to take the energy out of the collision so that you r body doesn't have to. Energy to your body means harm. Energy absorbed by the car means less to your body. Energy transferred through the car means more to your body and more damage to you. That is just simple physics. Every car collision is a simple physics problem. In a car crash that stops the car very abruptly like that, you just add up the energy in the kinetics of the car(s) and then figure out how it is going to be rapidly dissipated, including your bodies. New cars are designed to absorb this energy in ways that put less stress and harm to your body. Very little to no thought of any of that was given to any car in 1959-60. More car damage in the proper places in an accident may be less harm to you. But even relatively minor damage in the wrong places could easily mean death for you. Like you flying through the windshield and breaking your neck on the way out. Or you skull cracking up against a metal dashboard instead of a soft one. This argument will never fly with some people as they think a 'stronger' car is better. And is if all you care about is how much damage your car might sustain. But, if you care about how much damage you might sustain, you can bet 90 times out of 100, the new car is going to be decidedly safer. The only time it might not be if your car has a lot more m*** that what it is hitting. And in that case, the extra m*** gives you safety. Unless the smaller object is going a lot faster than you. Force = m*** x acceleration. If a small thing going very fast hits you, then your extra m*** is cancelled out and you are back to less safe engineering to protect you. So, there will always be scenarios where the older car could be safer than a new one. But, with an apples to apples m*** x speed x impact type, the new car will always be way safer because it was specifically designed to. Todays engineers know way more than they use to about how to make cars safer and they build that in cars now, absolutely no question. Anyone thinks otherwise, just simply doesn't know their facts or understands physics too much. With that said, I would still rather drive the Impala. But, for carrying my family and kids around on a daily basis, you can bet I would rather have a new car and do.
There's an old adage: Liars will figure, and figures will lie. WHOEVER staged the recent TV "demo" was doing an apples-to-oranges comparison, so not only was it obviously rigged, it was unfair to attempt to cast all older cars as patently, innately UNSAFE. They ALSO overlook the fact that anyone lucky enough to OWN a '20s to even early '70s car is WAY more likely to take care of it AND avoid crunch situations! You can ALWAYS get another Hyundai, but you CAN'T go down to the corner and order a new '57 Fury! I'm not Chicken Little, but folks, patriots need to be vigilant about preserving their rights as Americans. This "crash test" seems to me a devious attempt to subvert (maybe pervert) reality, to serve some unstated end game. I say, older cars are perfectly safe, driven carefully and well-maintained. May they ply streets and highways into the 22nd Century!
You can if you want, but the people who sold that car posted on Chevytalk.org complete with pre-crash photos, the car in the crash even has the same fuzzy dice on the mirror. It just had 50 years of road grime under there. The two in Tony's pictures look like they have about the same level of damage, that one car the hood is pushed up into the roof. Having had a '60 Pontiac with collision damage and having messed with multiple '59s I'm not sure where someone gets the idea the fender is bolted to the bumper. The bumper is on brackets and not attached to the tin. And I've already seen where the rear of the fender on these cars will push up if it's hit in the front. I really think they just took the '59, entered all the data on it into their computers, and picked a crash test that would cause as much damage as possible.
Any of you guys arguing what a tank those 59s are have never owned a 59 chevy drag car with the street gear taken off. We used to shuffle mine around the garage by grabbing the frame horns and picking it up and moving it over. There really ain't much to the front end structure. Big and cool? Definitely! Strong? No way. When I added a torque strap you could watch the sheetmetal gaps move on the 1-2 shift
And how exactly was it "rigged"? An "apples to oranges" comparison would have been colliding an 18-wheeler with the '59. This head-on collision was about as "apples to apples" as one could get when colliding a 2009 car to a 1959 car. The two photos posted earlier showing a head-on between the two '59s shows a very similar level of damage as was shown in the recent test video.
No kidding. Even a street-trim '59 is only 100 pounds heavier than the 2009 Malibu; and only 300 or so heavier than a 2009 Corvette. They aren't behemoths like the versions from the 70's/80's/90's.
Exactly why i posted them. There is just as much damage to both of those cars as the one in the test. And it was not staged obviously. Sad fact is we are all upset because they ruined an old car, and we as car 'people' cannot see the gain in it. We all pretty much know the difference in safety features from then and now, we didn't need them to show us. At least i didn't, but thats life. For some strange reason they thought it was a good idea. Not all idea's are good, or need to be carried out..oh well. time to move on
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