8 ms·

Definitely worth watching the video. Even though the results not surprising, it is still amazing to see how well the interior space around the 2009 driver stays

Definitely worth watching the video. Even though the results not surprising, it is still amazing to see how well the interior space around the 2009 driver stays intact. And how much the space around the 1959 drive does not. From the article: > According to safety engineers at the scene, the driver of the 2009 Chevrolet Malibu would likely have suffered slight knee injury. The driver of the 1959 Chevrolet Bel Air would have died instantly.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
bee_rider 4y ago
I bet the Malibu driver would have a sore neck for a while. Wonder how whiplash cases have trended over time. Wouldn't be surprised if they've gone up -- more survivable crashes, haha.
- thematrixturtle 4y ago
  Whiplash is also popular for insurance/disability fraud. There was an interesting story on HN a while back about how the prevalence of whiplash after accidents in the US is far higher than in Europe, for no other easily explainable reason, but I can't find the link now.
  - dylan604 4y ago
    Is whiplash something that shows up in some sort of scan that shows definitively yes/no that the patient has whiplash? If not, then that makes sense why it would be so prevelant of a thing for the ambulance chasers to use
    - bee_rider 4y ago
      I believe it is mostly just pulled muscles in the neck, so pretty hard to diagnose with imaging or that sort of thing.
    - smeej 4y ago
      Sometimes the muscles are compensating for a new instability in the spine from the trauma, which can be seen, but only with a motion x-ray. I had a motion x-ray done of my neck that finally demonstrated that my skull slips slightly side-to-side relative to my atlas (C1 vertebra). So what seemed like my muscles overreacting or just me complaining about psychogenic neck pain (or trying to scam the insurance company) was actually my muscular system making sure I don't suffer an internal decapitation. If anyone's having trouble with the insurance company insisting nothing is wrong because the static x-rays look fine, I cannot recommend highly enough that you look into a motion x-ray. It's very possible that your spine is only fine when it isn't moving, and that's no way to live your life.
  - aidenn0 4y ago
    My mom rear ended a teenager at low spveeds. The teenager was fine with no neck issues, but after talking with their parents suddenly had whiplash. She told the insurance company that the claim was probably fraudulent, and their response was "most whiplash claims are probably fraudulent, but it's cheaper to settle"
    - kube-system 4y ago
      Having been in a couple significant (totaled vehicles) rear end accidents, neck pain does tend to show up a little bit after the accident. I’ve never had it seriously enough that I’ve needed treatment, but I have had a minor kink in my neck that shows up later in the day. The kind of pain where it’s sore when you turn you head one very specific direction.
    - Jare 4y ago
      My wife was rear ended mildly by a truck years ago, and was initially ok other than the shock. Headaches and dizziness started after the next day and, including recovery with physiotherapy, lasted around 3 months. That stuff is not a joke. (more lighthearted note: after 3 months, her symptoms were mostly gone except for a new and intermittent nausea. The therapist was confounded for a few days, until he suggested the cause of that might be more related to me than the truck driver)
      - mellavora 4y ago
        trusting that the "intermittent nausea" could also be phrased "morning sickness", and congrats that this is due to you than a truck driver :)
      - patrec 4y ago
        Interesting -- to my naive mind headaches and dizziness sound more like a brain problem (concussion) than a neck problem (whiplash). So, if you don't mind sharing, I'm curious what the actual underlying problem was and how the physiotherapy solved it. I had a quick google but the only paper I found that proposed some mechanism ("vertebrobasilar artery insufficiency (VBI) leads to brainstem and cerebellar ischemia and infarction following cervical manipulation", i.e. bashing the neck might mess up blood flow to the brain somehow, causing bits of it to die off) looks complete bullshit.
  - Simon_O_Rourke 4y ago
    I find that hard to believe, a friend of mine in Ireland touched a taxi at no more than 5mph, leaving no obvious damage on the taxi itself, but with the taxi driver rolling on the road and getting an ambulance to hospital. There's big time insurance fraud going on there apparently.
    - Dah00n 4y ago
      Maybe this anecdote just show how bad it is in the US then.
  - bobthepanda 4y ago
    I wonder if it’s because of intersection designs. Traffic lights often result in rear-ends (they commonly increase after red light cam installation, though are still safer than the t-bones red light cameras reduce.) Roundabouts, which are more common in Europe, cause these much less, and since you have to slow down to enter one any sort of crashes in one tend to be at slower speeds.
    - varjag 4y ago
      In much of Europe roundabouts are quite uncommon. There's one thing that is ubiquitous in America but not in Europe though: 4-way stop intersections.
      - prmoustache 4y ago
        Let's say western europe then.
  - usrusr 4y ago
    I don't believe that it's just fraud: the claims aspect adds drama and the drama makes it objectively worse. I'm going through wiplash myself right now (mostly gone) and I think that too much drama played a major role. In my case not because of any claims situation, but because having recently gone through an intracranial hemorrhage and because of having spent a year of my early career typing out neurosurgery reports from dictaphone. The result was that I wasn't sufficiently confident that it might be "just whiplash". Went on for months, with hardly any improvement, until a physiotherapist gave me a demonstration of just how capable those muscles are of creating the nastiest headaches. I'm quite convinced that this change to my mind was more important than the changed my neck muscles. I'd expect the drama created by the claims situation too have a similar effect as that alleviated hypochondrism I had, creating a link from claims to severity that isn't related to fraud at all. Fraud certainly exists, but its role might be much smaller that suggested by that link. I remember that story from HN as well by the way, might actually have been a contributing factor in my disbelief/hypochondrism: "this pain is real, certainly not that thing that hardly exists outside of the American claims ecosystem". Beware of unexpected side-effects I guess. (another factor in the difference USA vs rest of the world, entirely unrelated to claims, is likely the "unique" relationship with painkillers. Tho put it in perspective: I lost two trips to France to that injury that I had been looking forward to for months, but didn't take a single pill in the entire ordeal)
- dogsgobork 4y ago
  I'm reminded of the anecdote about head injuries rates going up in war after helmets were issued. More head injuries due to fewer deaths.
  - aaronbrethorst 4y ago
    Canonical example is the header image on this Wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
    - sidewndr46 4y ago
      No, survivorship bias would be looking at motorcycle injuries by only talking to motorcycle injury survivors. Your conclusion would be that motorcycle injuries only result in minor small damage like skin abrasion, broken fingers, etc. Your conclusion would be that brain injuries basically never happen because all the survivors you spoke to were fine. If you're looking at casualties from motorcycle incidents, you by definition are not looking at survivors.
  - chris_wot 4y ago
    Isn't this a case of survivorship bias, like when they took a statistical view of all the areas where WWII airplanes got hit by bullets and they wanted to increase the armour, but a statistician told them to armour the parts where no bullets had hit... because they only surveyed planes that came back whole and the ones that didn't come back had likely been hit in parts of the plane they didn't add to the survey.
    - MonkeyClub 4y ago
      Yep, the canonical Wikipedia example that aaronbrethorst mentioned above. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias)
  - hef19898 4y ago
    Same thing every belligerent discovered during WW1 once the introduced steel helmets instead of leather.
13of40 4y ago
I think I watched an extended version of this where the older car, lacking a crumple zone, basically pretzeled the driver's legs.
xattt 4y ago
I completed a clinical rotation at a suburban hospital emergency department built in the boom of the 1950s. There was an apocryphal story circulating at the time about how things used to be, given the department was undergoing planning for replacement in the next half-decade. In earlier years, there used to be 3 neurosurgeons kept on staff. Once seatbelt laws came into effect in the 1970s, that number went down to 1.
- Gibbon1 4y ago
  Friend of mine's mom was an ICE nurse at Good Samaritans Hospital. She said patient load dropped a lot once they put in the barriers on hwy 17. And dropped some more when the helmet laws came into effect.
  - kube-system 4y ago
    I’m actually surprised they didn’t go up with helmet laws. Dead people need very little healthcare.
    - Gibbon1 4y ago
      I didn't add but she said a typical pre helmet law motorcycle patient was really being kept alive for organ donation.
      - dreamcompiler 4y ago
        When EMTs in my area see a motorcycle screaming by at 85 mph with an unhelmeted rider they call it a "donorcycle."
        lippel82 4y ago
        An emergency room physician once told me, they used to call the first sunny days of spring "Nierenwetter" ("kidney weather").
    - mongol 4y ago
thrown_22 4y ago
When people ask why we don't have flying cars this is why. Least we forget in 1959 the US car industry was already 60 years old.
- icedistilled 4y ago
  realistically it would be electric cars being widespread 15-20 years go. But yeah this comment is barely an exaggeration about flying cars. The car industry fought tooth and nail against seat belts and other things like collapsible steering columns.
  - withinboredom 4y ago
    Isn’t there a movie about this? I vaguely remember watching one where the big names were sabotaging the inventor of the seatbelt.
    - resist_futility 4y ago
      Maybe you were thinking of "Flash Of Genius" about intermittent windshield wipers?
    - Treblemaker 4y ago
      Or this? Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tucker_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tucker_(film)
      - withinboredom 4y ago
        That’s the one!
  - msh 4y ago
    The modern seatbelt was invented by a volvo engineer, and they freely shared it with the rest of the industry. I am certain that some car makers did not like the idea, but you cant say that the industry as a whole fought against seatbelts.
rmason 4y ago
Saw a video of a main thoroughfare in Lansing, MI filmed in the early sixties. It was a test for a camera shop I think. It was neat watching pristine versions of cars I remember from my youth. Then they captured a crash between two vehicles at about 35 mph. Today both parties would get out and exchange insurance companies. However this was not the case. Two ambulances hauled away the drivers and the narrator of the film said one did not make it. Indeed we have come a long way in car safety in the past sixty years.
- consumer451 4y ago
  > Indeed we have come a long way in car safety in the past sixty years. I am genuinely curious where we would be now in regard to automotive safety without government regulation.
  - notsapiensatall 4y ago
    Probably about where we are with pedestrian/cyclist safety. In NA, lack of safety regulations is resulting in massively increased ride and hood heights, which is going to kill a lot of people over the coming years.
  - dotancohen 4y ago
    Pretty much where we are in terms of climate change. Knowing that we need to do something, everybody fearing being the first to move.
    - saiya-jin 4y ago
      Not sure why the downvotes, just look at discussions here on HN about cyclists/escotters drivers wearing helmets. Cant find the link on phone now but it was pretty eye opening. People fighting tooth and nails that without helmets they ride safer (what?), they have more situational awareness (more what? we talk about cyclists helmets) and various other arguments that make 0 sense to me, just emotional swings of people rejecting being told what to do by default. My 2 cents - I didnt wear helmet on bike during youth since nobody did. But when I bought my new xc bike in 2008 I bought a helmet with it. Within a month I had accident due to screwup of my GF back then, where I hit the ground face down hard, losing few seconds of my memory. There was spiky stone in the ground where my forehead hit full force. I would be dead for a long time now if I didnt wear that helmet. No accident before or after, but you only need that 1 moment, same with safety belts.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

bee_rider 4y ago

I bet the Malibu driver would have a sore neck for a while. Wonder how whiplash cases have trended over time. Wouldn't be surprised if they've gone up -- more survivable crashes, haha.

thematrixturtle 4y ago
Whiplash is also popular for insurance/disability fraud. There was an interesting story on HN a while back about how the prevalence of whiplash after accidents in the US is far higher than in Europe, for no other easily explainable reason, but I can't find the link now.
- dylan604 4y ago
  Is whiplash something that shows up in some sort of scan that shows definitively yes/no that the patient has whiplash? If not, then that makes sense why it would be so prevelant of a thing for the ambulance chasers to use
  - bee_rider 4y ago
    I believe it is mostly just pulled muscles in the neck, so pretty hard to diagnose with imaging or that sort of thing.
  - smeej 4y ago
    Sometimes the muscles are compensating for a new instability in the spine from the trauma, which can be seen, but only with a motion x-ray. I had a motion x-ray done of my neck that finally demonstrated that my skull slips slightly side-to-side relative to my atlas (C1 vertebra). So what seemed like my muscles overreacting or just me complaining about psychogenic neck pain (or trying to scam the insurance company) was actually my muscular system making sure I don't suffer an internal decapitation. If anyone's having trouble with the insurance company insisting nothing is wrong because the static x-rays look fine, I cannot recommend highly enough that you look into a motion x-ray. It's very possible that your spine is only fine when it isn't moving, and that's no way to live your life.
- aidenn0 4y ago
  My mom rear ended a teenager at low spveeds. The teenager was fine with no neck issues, but after talking with their parents suddenly had whiplash. She told the insurance company that the claim was probably fraudulent, and their response was "most whiplash claims are probably fraudulent, but it's cheaper to settle"
  - kube-system 4y ago
    Having been in a couple significant (totaled vehicles) rear end accidents, neck pain does tend to show up a little bit after the accident. I’ve never had it seriously enough that I’ve needed treatment, but I have had a minor kink in my neck that shows up later in the day. The kind of pain where it’s sore when you turn you head one very specific direction.
  - Jare 4y ago
    My wife was rear ended mildly by a truck years ago, and was initially ok other than the shock. Headaches and dizziness started after the next day and, including recovery with physiotherapy, lasted around 3 months. That stuff is not a joke. (more lighthearted note: after 3 months, her symptoms were mostly gone except for a new and intermittent nausea. The therapist was confounded for a few days, until he suggested the cause of that might be more related to me than the truck driver)
    - mellavora 4y ago
      trusting that the "intermittent nausea" could also be phrased "morning sickness", and congrats that this is due to you than a truck driver :)
    - patrec 4y ago
      Interesting -- to my naive mind headaches and dizziness sound more like a brain problem (concussion) than a neck problem (whiplash). So, if you don't mind sharing, I'm curious what the actual underlying problem was and how the physiotherapy solved it. I had a quick google but the only paper I found that proposed some mechanism ("vertebrobasilar artery insufficiency (VBI) leads to brainstem and cerebellar ischemia and infarction following cervical manipulation", i.e. bashing the neck might mess up blood flow to the brain somehow, causing bits of it to die off) looks complete bullshit.
- Simon_O_Rourke 4y ago
  I find that hard to believe, a friend of mine in Ireland touched a taxi at no more than 5mph, leaving no obvious damage on the taxi itself, but with the taxi driver rolling on the road and getting an ambulance to hospital. There's big time insurance fraud going on there apparently.
  - Dah00n 4y ago
    Maybe this anecdote just show how bad it is in the US then.
- bobthepanda 4y ago
  I wonder if it’s because of intersection designs. Traffic lights often result in rear-ends (they commonly increase after red light cam installation, though are still safer than the t-bones red light cameras reduce.) Roundabouts, which are more common in Europe, cause these much less, and since you have to slow down to enter one any sort of crashes in one tend to be at slower speeds.
  - varjag 4y ago
    In much of Europe roundabouts are quite uncommon. There's one thing that is ubiquitous in America but not in Europe though: 4-way stop intersections.
    - prmoustache 4y ago
      Let's say western europe then.
- usrusr 4y ago
  I don't believe that it's just fraud: the claims aspect adds drama and the drama makes it objectively worse. I'm going through wiplash myself right now (mostly gone) and I think that too much drama played a major role. In my case not because of any claims situation, but because having recently gone through an intracranial hemorrhage and because of having spent a year of my early career typing out neurosurgery reports from dictaphone. The result was that I wasn't sufficiently confident that it might be "just whiplash". Went on for months, with hardly any improvement, until a physiotherapist gave me a demonstration of just how capable those muscles are of creating the nastiest headaches. I'm quite convinced that this change to my mind was more important than the changed my neck muscles. I'd expect the drama created by the claims situation too have a similar effect as that alleviated hypochondrism I had, creating a link from claims to severity that isn't related to fraud at all. Fraud certainly exists, but its role might be much smaller that suggested by that link. I remember that story from HN as well by the way, might actually have been a contributing factor in my disbelief/hypochondrism: "this pain is real, certainly not that thing that hardly exists outside of the American claims ecosystem". Beware of unexpected side-effects I guess. (another factor in the difference USA vs rest of the world, entirely unrelated to claims, is likely the "unique" relationship with painkillers. Tho put it in perspective: I lost two trips to France to that injury that I had been looking forward to for months, but didn't take a single pill in the entire ordeal)
dogsgobork 4y ago
I'm reminded of the anecdote about head injuries rates going up in war after helmets were issued. More head injuries due to fewer deaths.
- aaronbrethorst 4y ago
  Canonical example is the header image on this Wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
  - sidewndr46 4y ago
    No, survivorship bias would be looking at motorcycle injuries by only talking to motorcycle injury survivors. Your conclusion would be that motorcycle injuries only result in minor small damage like skin abrasion, broken fingers, etc. Your conclusion would be that brain injuries basically never happen because all the survivors you spoke to were fine. If you're looking at casualties from motorcycle incidents, you by definition are not looking at survivors.
- chris_wot 4y ago
  Isn't this a case of survivorship bias, like when they took a statistical view of all the areas where WWII airplanes got hit by bullets and they wanted to increase the armour, but a statistician told them to armour the parts where no bullets had hit... because they only surveyed planes that came back whole and the ones that didn't come back had likely been hit in parts of the plane they didn't add to the survey.
  - MonkeyClub 4y ago
    Yep, the canonical Wikipedia example that aaronbrethorst mentioned above. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias)
- hef19898 4y ago
  Same thing every belligerent discovered during WW1 once the introduced steel helmets instead of leather.

13of40 4y ago

I think I watched an extended version of this where the older car, lacking a crumple zone, basically pretzeled the driver's legs.

xattt 4y ago

I completed a clinical rotation at a suburban hospital emergency department built in the boom of the 1950s. There was an apocryphal story circulating at the time about how things used to be, given the department was undergoing planning for replacement in the next half-decade. In earlier years, there used to be 3 neurosurgeons kept on staff. Once seatbelt laws came into effect in the 1970s, that number went down to 1.

Gibbon1 4y ago
Friend of mine's mom was an ICE nurse at Good Samaritans Hospital. She said patient load dropped a lot once they put in the barriers on hwy 17. And dropped some more when the helmet laws came into effect.
- kube-system 4y ago
  I’m actually surprised they didn’t go up with helmet laws. Dead people need very little healthcare.
  - Gibbon1 4y ago
    I didn't add but she said a typical pre helmet law motorcycle patient was really being kept alive for organ donation.
    - dreamcompiler 4y ago
      When EMTs in my area see a motorcycle screaming by at 85 mph with an unhelmeted rider they call it a "donorcycle."
      - lippel82 4y ago
        An emergency room physician once told me, they used to call the first sunny days of spring "Nierenwetter" ("kidney weather").
  - mongol 4y ago

thrown_22 4y ago

When people ask why we don't have flying cars this is why. Least we forget in 1959 the US car industry was already 60 years old.

icedistilled 4y ago
realistically it would be electric cars being widespread 15-20 years go. But yeah this comment is barely an exaggeration about flying cars. The car industry fought tooth and nail against seat belts and other things like collapsible steering columns.
- withinboredom 4y ago
  Isn’t there a movie about this? I vaguely remember watching one where the big names were sabotaging the inventor of the seatbelt.
  - resist_futility 4y ago
    Maybe you were thinking of "Flash Of Genius" about intermittent windshield wipers?
  - Treblemaker 4y ago
    Or this? Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tucker_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tucker_(film)
    - withinboredom 4y ago
      That’s the one!
- msh 4y ago
  The modern seatbelt was invented by a volvo engineer, and they freely shared it with the rest of the industry. I am certain that some car makers did not like the idea, but you cant say that the industry as a whole fought against seatbelts.

rmason 4y ago

Saw a video of a main thoroughfare in Lansing, MI filmed in the early sixties. It was a test for a camera shop I think. It was neat watching pristine versions of cars I remember from my youth. Then they captured a crash between two vehicles at about 35 mph. Today both parties would get out and exchange insurance companies. However this was not the case. Two ambulances hauled away the drivers and the narrator of the film said one did not make it. Indeed we have come a long way in car safety in the past sixty years.

consumer451 4y ago
> Indeed we have come a long way in car safety in the past sixty years. I am genuinely curious where we would be now in regard to automotive safety without government regulation.
- notsapiensatall 4y ago
  Probably about where we are with pedestrian/cyclist safety. In NA, lack of safety regulations is resulting in massively increased ride and hood heights, which is going to kill a lot of people over the coming years.
- dotancohen 4y ago
  Pretty much where we are in terms of climate change. Knowing that we need to do something, everybody fearing being the first to move.
  - saiya-jin 4y ago
    Not sure why the downvotes, just look at discussions here on HN about cyclists/escotters drivers wearing helmets. Cant find the link on phone now but it was pretty eye opening. People fighting tooth and nails that without helmets they ride safer (what?), they have more situational awareness (more what? we talk about cyclists helmets) and various other arguments that make 0 sense to me, just emotional swings of people rejecting being told what to do by default. My 2 cents - I didnt wear helmet on bike during youth since nobody did. But when I bought my new xc bike in 2008 I bought a helmet with it. Within a month I had accident due to screwup of my GF back then, where I hit the ground face down hard, losing few seconds of my memory. There was spiky stone in the ground where my forehead hit full force. I would be dead for a long time now if I didnt wear that helmet. No accident before or after, but you only need that 1 moment, same with safety belts.