As if we didn’t get the message the last time it was done: yes, Virginia, newer cars really are safer. Then it was the IIHS; this time it’s Stuntbusters. What the hell is that name supposed to mean? If they “bust” stunts, then why bother with this lame one? And BTW, that 2002 Cadillac DTS has a “big block” V8. And if I’m ever subjected to that kind of video editing again, I’m going throw up to prove the obvious.
1962 Cadillac Destroyed To Prove The Obvious: Newer Cars Are Safer!
– Posted on November 28, 2011
That was painful to watch. Not the crash, the video itself.
sure a uni-body will crumple better then a solid frame car.
so why not compare an old uni-body car against a new uni-body car
a 1967 Plymouth Fury III saved my life with its uni-body construction .
i ran off the road and hit trees at 100 mph with no seat belt and lived
not just luck either cause my 3 passengers were without a scratch.
all i had was a fractured leg and didn’t even go to the hospital.all doors still opened and closed even though the front end was smashed we all just stepped out.
so lets see the Cadillac hit the Fury !!!! both uni-bodies….
o yeah the problem with the seats coming lose from the floor was not because of rust.
when i wrecked my Fury III it was the sliding track that gave way not rust
my seat broke away also,it was the track that came apart.
(the track is what the seat slides on for seat adjustment)
i am sure that is what happened to the Cadillac also,it was not rusted enough .
was actually in great shape and guess what they don’t make those cars anymore,you wasteful idiots !!!!!
The 4.6 Northstar’s a “big block”? That is pretty bad.
I’m sure the producers thought a ’62 Caddy lookin’ like that to be highly expendable but here in the Northeast, we call that prime restoration material…
I think what’s more laughable is the “15 foot” 1962 Caddy. A 1962 Corvair is 15 feet almost on the nose. Umm. The Cadillac is significantly larger than a Corvair. Someone doesn’t know how to use a measuring tape.
Perhaps they mixed up length with wheelbase?
Hey, let’s ruin two perfectly good cars! Now granted, the ’62 is far from mint, but why destroy it when NHTSA already ruined a nice ’59 Chevy showing the same thing?
I agree with you, but in the case of the ’59 you had morons saying if it was some other GM model from the era it would have done better, the X frame was just like that, and blah blah blah blah.
It takes a true, 24-karat idiot to honestly believe old cars are safer than new cars, but there are a ton who do.
The ’62 Cadillac has an X frame as well.
Actually, the passenger compartment of the Caddy did not collapse in on itself like the ’59 Chevy did. The major problem with the Caddy was that the driver’s seat came loose from the floor and crushed the driver dummy against the steering wheel. We don’t know whether there was any rust in the Caddy floorpan affecting the integrity of the seat mounting areas. The driver was not belted, but in reality seat belts probably would not have helped. In fact, if the seat belt anchors were stronger than the seat mounting bolts, the seat belt would simply have crushed the lower abdoment of the driver. Something to think about when retrofitting seat belts to old cars.
I think people who think like this are still stuck in the ’80s when a “full-size” Buick LeSabre was 800 pounds lighter than the same model in the ’60s, and had none of the safety technology we have now. People forget that 21st-century cars are just as massive as same-size-class vehicles of 50 years ago, and have all that fancy new safety technology, crumple zones, etc., plus generally higher quality construction.
It’s just typical old-days-were-better thinking. Most under-40s know better than this.
Most but not all. A lot of people look at the relative damage in a low speed fender bender and assume the old cars are ‘more solid’
Over 40 years ago, the IIHS did low speed crash tests at 5, 10 and 15 mph. Results are not as good as you would think for many cars:
http://www.iihs.org/externaldata/srdata/docs/sr0510.pdf
“Hey, let’s ruin two perfectly good cars!”
I agree. They should have used same-year Fords. No loss there!
I get it. I crash head on in any Vintage C-body and I end up like Jayne Mansfield. But I would have been driving a vintage C-Body. We all go at some point. To quote one of my favorite fluffy movies, “What A Way To Go!”
Oh look! Another lame “Mythbusters” ripoff. Somebody matched up the superficial aspects, while completely missing WHY Mythbusters is successful.
Yes. While I really don’t like it when the Mythbusters decide to wreck a collectible vehicle like a ’65 Imperial Crown or ’67 Fury III, they do actually put on a fun, entertaining show.
To their credit, they usually use something like a 10 year old Taurus or Crown Vic to destroy. The ones that killed me were the rust-free X1/9, and what I think was a mid-sixties Toyota Crown Coupe.
“while completely missing WHY Mythbusters is successful.”
Kari Byron?
She does it for me, anyway…
Rowr!
Married with 2 kids… (sigh)
Next up, an efficiency test pits the Stanley Model 72 Roadster against the Honda CR-Z.
I hear the CR-Z is powered by a 1.4L BIG BLOCK I4.
These crash tests don’t really take into consideration the way you would drive a classic car in the real world.
I think in many ways my 1962 Rover p4 (my ‘old’ car) is safer than my 1979 Volvo 245 (my ‘new’ car). The reason is that I’ve spent countless hours and pounds restoring the Rover, and drive it as such. I anticipate anything that might come out of anywhere to damage it or me.
Conversely, the Volvo tends to instill a feeling of invincibility, which leads me to subconsciously take more risks. I will make a right turn on a busier road in a smaller gap than I would dare to in the Rover, I drive it on narrower country (one lane) roads at faster speeds, and on the M25 and other accident blackspots during busier periods. Thus, statistically I am more likely to come to harm in the Volvo than the Rover. However, I do recognize that there are accidents that are not survivable even in a 30 year old Volvo, so I don’t take stupid risks.
I think that the passive safety cult has led to people taking more and more risks, and driving like total buttholes. It used to be that only young people thought they were invincible when driving, and thus used their cars as weapons. Now, as most accidents are survivable, the marketing myth of invincibility has created drivers who intentionally drive aggressively and dangerously, safe in the knowledge that their mistakes or red mist will be unlikely to result in their demise, with little thought or care about the other driver.
My first car was a ’65 Corvair. I learned from my earliest days of driving that any mistake on either my part or others would likely be fatal. This is a good lesson that everyone should learn.
Wow- that made me sound like an old coot, and I’m only 34. I guess I have an early onset version of ‘grumpyitis.’
In boating (at least in Sweden), there’s the concept of “safe speed”. A skipper must always maintain safe speed. And what is that? That is when the skipper is always in control, no accidents happen, and he doesn’t run into things. If he do run into something, like another boat, dry land, or some way off surfer, then, obviously, he hasn’t maintained safe speed. If he had, the accident simply wouldn’t have happened. And he is therefor liable.
I think that concept should apply to cars as well. If something happens, then, obviously, the driver have not maintained safe speed, the driver have not been in control of the car, and he is therefor liable. “Accidents” are no accidents, they simply don’t happen by themselves, they happen because someone wasn’t in control.
Agreed, with both you and Ingvar. I drive my ’66 Ford pickup very defensively, and leave plenty of room in front of me. I know I can’t control every variable, but I’m determined to control every one possible.
I have to agree as well. While I’m sure the new cars are safer, most people driving older ones (that have been restored or are near-mint original) are driving them more cautiously. I know when I’m in my ’58 Eldorado or ’68 XKE Jaguar Roadster, I’m a hell of a lot more careful than when I’m driving to the office in my 2011 S8. It’s not much a matter of safety as much as ease of replacement. I can get a new 2011, but I’m not going to get a ’58 or a ’68 in pristine condition without a lot of headache and restoration… or just a boatload of cash which will be the case in either instance.
That video editing made me phsycially ill. Seriously.
me, too, and i’m a professional video editor. to add another grumpy old man comment (i’m 50), video tools have gotten significantly easier to use and now all kinds of inexperienced idiots call themselves editors. it’s like me claiming that i’m a writer because i know microsoft word. because of the proliferation of media outlets, the budget for a show like this is miniscule. they hire eager young beavers who grew up in an attention deficit environment and pay them peanuts to crank this stuff out.
OK, it’s not just me.
Gawd, how I hate the MTV quick cuts, the flash-focus in and out, and the same farkin’ sound effects (esp. the crash cymbal in reverse) as used on Ghost Hunters…
I couldn’t watch the clip. I started to, but the same old crap I can see on many other ‘reality’ shows. Besides, there wasn’t enough screen time on the blonde, the only other reason why I bothered to click on it…
didnt enjoy that clip the old Caddy was inquite good shape Im definitely very defensive in my old Minx the steering wheel is very close to my chest and its kinda obvious what would happen in a headon it has belts but not factory reinforced mountings that wasnt required here ti 65 also like Brian with his Rover I spent a lot of effort getting it staight and tidy
The whole clip, to me didn’t really show much, other than the crumple zone on the newer Caddy did its job, but we never see how the dummy fared for there WAS no dummy and we didn’t see the airbags go off, which they should’ve so the whole thing was rigged and not totally fair.
That said, the 62 caddy didn’t have some of the earliest safety features found as early as 1968, like a collapsible steering column. a padded dash and head rests, which didn’t become standard until I think 1969, along with front disc brakes etc.
What I did notice was the 2002 Caddilac’s front did collapse inward and the passenger cabin looked to remain relatively intact, the 62’s frame buckled and bent from the A pillar to the B pillar at the very least, showing signs that the passenger cabin could not sustain the force of the impact without the front collapsing to maintain integrity.
That said, we never were shown whether the front bench stayed in place or was broken loose from loose/corroded moorings and shoved the driver dummy into the steering wheel. Judging from the condition of the vintage caddy, it may have had some rust issues but looked reasonably solid otherwise for a nearly 50 YO car.
What a shock, this must mean that not only was the IIHS right, but all the engineers working on making cars safer for the last 40 years have not been wasting their time. :O
Shocking news. Well, what’s next, are they going to see if a 1970 Chevelle 454 SS really gets worse milage than a new Honda CR-Z ?
Every time I see something like this, I wonder how anyone over 50 is still alive.
if i remember right, someone posted a video around here of an older volvo or benz not fairing well vs. a modern car. that shocked me a lot more than this nonsense because i had assumed there weren’t any big breakthroughs since the 1980s. modern structural design and build actually is much better.
“i had assumed there weren’t any big breakthroughs since the 1980s.”
Wow. That is scary. What cars before the late 1990s did not have is what is known as Ultra High Strength Steel. It has 110,000 pounds per square inch of tensile strength. And that steel is what the passenger compartments of new cars are made of. The old cars, and the crumple zones of new cars, are made of mild steel – only 35,000 pounds per square inch of tensile strength. So the passenger compartments of new cars are 3 times stronger than any part of the old cars. It’s the new cars that are ‘tanks’, and the old cars that are made of the proverbial ‘tinfoil’. As a matter of fact, the newest cars are made up of up to 5 types of steel, carefully located in the right places to absorb impact in some places, and to be very rigid in others in varying amounts.
Have a look at crash tests from that time, which are at a slower speed than today’s, and see the roof-a pillar area starting to buckle in a ‘good’ result for the time, and compare to today’s where there is no distortion at all, let alone no intrusion past the A pillar which was common/normal 20 years ago.
The only thing this video has going for it is that the Cadillac wasn’t as nice a driver as the ’59 Chevy the *^&#$ers at the IIHS destroyed. But it’s a shame to see all those nice Western parts go to waste.
My driving in the Cadillac has always been defensive, partly because I realize that I’m sitting in front of a GM Impale-O-Matic steering column piloting a car with brakes, steering, and suspension that just aren’t as responsive and tight as a modern car. The other part of my defensiveness is due to the fact that I don’t want to have to hunt down parts to fix my baby after some idiot in a Corolla plows into my rear end because he doesn’t know that 1966 cars don’t have third brake lights.
But does that mean I’ll cosset myself in a padded cell on wheels if I don’t have to? NO! I have too much fun bopping around in 18 1/2 feet of shiny black steel to want to stop. When one of my ecoweenie coworkers started in on the IIHS ’59 Chevy video and luridly described the gory end that awaited me behind the wheel of my ’66 Fleetwood my response was, “You’re right, but it’d take six morticians to get the smile off my face.”
My 1961 Falcon can be scary when I’m surrounded by morons in 4,000 pound + SUVs with huge blindspots. I will argue that cars from this time period are far safer in one respect. I can actually see out of them.
How dare these morons destroy a nice old Caddy to prove the obvious. These kind of people make me hate vibrant youth, and I’m 18.
I’m not so sure I’d call their ’62 Cadillac “nice”. There is a reason why the seats flew forward during the crash; the whole car was probably rusted.
Should have used a mid 70s model with 5mph bumpers. Then we would have seen some carnage to that 2002. 😛
You really had to destroy an irreplaceable car to prove something anyone with common sense should know? Do you feel like a real scientist now and have you now revolutionized the automotive industry? Congratulations morons.
Yawn. Dummies in the front seat? Should have put the presenters there.