What's the deal with crash testing?

have been Pinto's what was it. I know that we talked a lot about car safety and engineering and how I don't know, Man, I don't know. I'm suddenly creeped out. Are you confident we have not done this one? I would put my confidence at I searched so far and wide, all right, which is we've three that is well above the fifty threshold that we required to possibly rerecording. Like,

none of this, none of this seemed particularly familiar. We've definitely talked about something like crumple zones, that kind of thing, because we've talked about how cars we like I used to think they were pieces of junk now, but they're actually designed to come apart like that because in doing so, they protect the people inside. We've definitely talked about that, but and that really applies to what we're about to talk about. But the actual details of what we're about

to talk about, I don't recognize them as familiar. Alright, forward forward we go. So so cars have become exponentially safer than they used to be. UM. There's, first of all, hats off to not only the house stuff Works article were working from UM, but also a Consumer Reports article on crash testing that was really great, and then one from Jelopnick that was a really great one about crash testing your are And on that Gelopnic article, that's a

great website. It is, it's wonderful. UM. On that Gelopnic article, they posted a YouTube video that made the rounds like a few years back, UM, and it's a it's a two thousand nine Malibu versus a nine bel Air and they go head on and the the dummy and the Malibu is like what, I didn't even notice anything, and the person in the bell Air just disintegrates. Basically, the crash test dummy and the bell are just disintegrates. Because

cars used to be made too to be sturdy. But that's really bad for you in the car nowadays, they're made to not be sturdy, and that moves the force and the energy of the impact around the car and not into you. And the reason why cars are so much better these days now is because we started crash testing them, and the people who test them, who crash test them, started telling the public, Hey, this car doesn't due very well in a crash test. Uh, this car

does really great in a crash test. And people started to kind of sit up and listen and go, oh, wait, we can survive a crash now if we buy a certain car. Let's go buy that car. And then automakers started to try to keep up and catch up, and safety became an important thing. And again it was almost exclusively thanks to crash testing. Yeah, car maker said, I guess we all got to start making things go again to nanny state. All right, So let's go back a

little bit. We'll talk very briefly about the history of crash testing, because, like you said, in the early days, it was basically, if a car performed well out there on the road, um, then great, that's kind of we care about driving the car, not crashing the car. Why would anyone care about that? And then in nineteen thirty four, General Motors said, you know what, maybe we should crash a car because it turns out that you can die when you crash these things, so maybe we should look

into this. So GM held the very first barrier test at Milford Proving Ground in Michigan in n with an unoccupied vehicle, and they would do this in different ways. Sometimes they would like cartoon style, actually in both cases cartoon style, just like release the emergency brake and give it a push down the hill. Or they would say, hey, driver, get in there, and as you approach that brick wall, um jump out. And they said, okay, I guess that's fine. Um,

how much are you gonna pay me for that? I don't worry about that, don't you a prisoner from a chain gang? Nothing? Right? So uh, these early tests, again, they weren't too protect people. They were just to try and make sure the car could hold up a little better. And so other car companies, as they started building cars, started doing this. They didn't have proving grounds necessarily, so sometimes they would even do this on public roads, which

was nuts. Uh. And then a ninth fifty two, a man named Sam Alderson really changed the game when he founded Alderson Research Laboratories, which would later on become something you may have heard of called human eddics. Uh. They were doing they won the very first contract to create anthropomorphic dummies for testing airplanes and spacecraft, like ejection seats,

that kind of thing. And then eventually they said they were using like sandbags and stuff like that, and eventually they said, hey, wait a minute, you could do this in cars too. So he got together with Sierra Engineering, the Sierra Engineering Company, and created the very first crash test dummy, Sierra Sam. Oh, that's right. We talked about Sierra Sam in the Murphy's Law episode. Okay, maybe it's

just a bunch of stuff cobbled together. It makes me think we did this one possible, But Sierra Sam came along. They applied all these concepts to automotive testing. And Sam Alderson is sort of a legend now. He side at the age of ninety and two thousand five and was posthumously inducted into the National Inventor's Halma Fame. In with a lot of inventions, but largely this crash testumy patent

did one was the big one. Yeah, so was that the one that was called the high hybrid three um the Hybrid three and this is still human edics by the way, that makes these Yeah, they're they're like the Yeah, they're like as good as it gets with crash test dummy, create, design and creation. Yeah, was when the hybrid three was first developed, and then I think they upgraded it in ninety one to take seatbelts into consideration, and then in

ninety seven to take air bags into consideration. And now the standard and we'll get to why they did this, is the H three five F meaning fifth female. So the fifth, fifth percentile size wise female is the standard me that's used. Now, that's great, and that's a huge, huge progression because for decades and decades they used what was known as the fiftieth percentile male dummy, which which was yeah, five ft ten inches, hundred and seventy pounds.

And he was introduced from what I saw in nineteen seventies six, at a time when the average male in the United States was five ten hundred and seventy pounds. Well, the average male in the United States has not been five seventy pounds for a really long time. They the average males gained about twenty five pounds and shrunken inch since then, that's the average male in the United States now.

But the problem is is like these crash testers were still using that that um fiftie percentile male male dummy even though it didn't apply. And that's not to say anything about child dummies, female dummies. Um they were. It was basically like you know how when they test a new drug, they tested on the healthiest, least vulnerable population and then say it works. That's exactly what the history

of crash testing has done. Uh. And but only in the last I don't know, probably ten ten years or so have they really been like, no, we really need to expand the types of dummies that we're using. So they're coming up with they're using female dummies more frequently, child dummies more frequently, obese dummies because apparently an obese person is about seventy percent likelier to die in a

car accident than a non obese person. So they're now creating obese dummies to get a better idea of just how safe these actually are and as close to a real world application as possible. Yeah, And I mean the way I read this is at some point they said, well, we need to make these safe for all drivers, So what's the most vulnerable driver probably and they all said, well, I guess a sixteen year old girl m is, you know, statistically most likely to be probably the smallest version of

these dummies. So that's what they went with. They went with the fifth percentile UH female hybrid three. And I guess the reckoning is if it can be safe for them, then it can be safe for that dumb, average male. It's pretty great. Yeah, there's but it's still not required. There's actually a representative, a congresswoman from d C named Eleanor Holmes Norton, who just this past June introduced a bill that would require UM crash testers to also use

UM female dummies too. So right now it's not it's not range. Of course they should use. Range is just sensible and so that you know, the people who do crash testing are aware of this and they're starting to. But there's one other thing I saw about crash test dummies. UM. One of the things they can't replicate is tissue damage, but even real damage like when when you do crash tests.

We'll talk to about a little more detail in a second, but UM, when you use a dummy for that kind of thing, they're outfitted with loads of different kinds of sensors, hundreds of sensors, recording all this amazing data, and then they take that data and they they basically turned it into a statistical likelihood that that amount of force, that amount of acceleration um, that amount of g's suddenly pressing on your chest would cause an injury or not. That's

what crash test dummies do for us. But they don't actually replicate like tissue damage or your leg falling off or anything like that um because they're made to be used over and over and over again so that they could be subjected to the kinds of stuff that would just destroy human body. So some crash testing chuck chuck. Some crash testing uses post mortem human subjects. I wondered if that's where this is going. A lot of post mortem human subjects, some of them embalmed, which we failed

to mention in our embalming episode, some fresh. They call them fresh because an embalmed one is just not going to replicate the kind of yuck sure that a fresh one well. And so that's a huge part of crash testing, from what I can tell, is using post mortem human

subjects as well. Wow, that's amazing um. And we should also point out maybe we'll take a break, but before we take one, we should point out that this that car companies do all kinds of internal crash testing before they get to the regulatory crash testing because you don't want to you don't want to fail those, So they they'll crash eighty two d new vehicles in a line before they even get to their regulatory bodies to do

their official crashes. And what we're mainly talking about is those official crashes, but I imagine they're all pretty similar. Now we should also say those official crashes there, they're not even necessarily official. Basically, the NASH No Highway trans Traffic Safety Administration has a bunch of guidelines, some of them involving crashes, and then they basically say, these are the guidelines. You met you you car makers better meet them, but they don't go and actually like test the cars

for that. The crashing that they're doing is beyond the minimum the law requires, so nobody's actually testing the the auto makers cars to to see that they meet the minimum requirements. It's just the threat of basically being sued into oblivion for not meeting those minimum standards is um is what keeps the car makers honest. And then that and then one other thing I saw from that Jelopnick article is the minimum legal standards that a car can be put out on an American road are so low

that they they so vastly, like like under under meat, undersatisfy. Yes, thank you, Charles, They so vastly undersatisfy what the average American would be willing to get in and drive. That just you know what Americans want to drive as far as safety is concerned. Is one of is that that's what carmakers are meeting, not just the minimum legal requirements. So interesting, you're probably your car is probably going to

exceed those minimum legal requirements. You don't really have to worry about that in the United States, right, and then we'll talk about this at the end. Their tests completely separate that done by the Insurance Institute for How We Safety that are even more different, more robusts. Great set up, my friend, Chuck, Great set up to you, my friend. Can we just stop now or do we have to come back? We probably already did this episode anyway, so we can just stop, all right, Well we'll be back

right after this anyway. Well, now we're on the road driving in your truck. Want to learn a thing or two from Josh Chuck, you should know all right, all right, so we laid the groundwork here. We know they're crashing some cars a lot, all in the name of making things safe for us. But we know that they're not saying, uh, they're not like it's not like GM says, all right, here's here's the car. Go tell us if it's okay. It's it's a voluntary thing sort of um like good

luck selling cars if you don't. But sure it's voluntary. And they're loaded with seven with sensors. Like you said, they're accelerometers, h and accelerometers are going to measure acceleration in a particular direction. They used this obviously to determine if you might get injured. Um. Acceleration is the rate

at which speed changes. So if you're driving a car and uh, you let's say there were no air bags back in the day and no seat belts and your head hits that windshield, the acceleration from your head flying forward to hitting uh not zero because it's going to

go through the windshield. Um, but it's gonna decrease really really fast, and that that rate of acceleration change is the danger, and making car safe is all about softening that and lessening that kinetic energy of your body and that car's energy going from whatever speed it's going through to zero. Yeah, because yeah, you and the car are both traveling the same speed and you you both have to stop pretty quickly. Um, you want to cut down in the car transferring it's kinetic energy to you, and

then you want to cut down on your kinetic energy. Like, if you're gonna have to transfer your kinetic energy is something, let it be like an air bag or something like that, rather than the dashboard. Right. So that's why they have these accelerometers all over the place. They're in your head, they're in the chest, they're in the pelvis, they're in kind of everybody part you can think of their accelerometers.

And it's it's neat. Like I was saying, like the the crush test dummies, the anthropomorphic test devices is what they're called in the industry. Um, they are getting more and more um bio fedelic like they're they're faithful to biology is basically what that word means. Um. And so

you're you're finding crashed stummies. They are starting to have like simulated internal organs and all that stuff, because I mean, I can guess if you're in the industry, you probably don't really want to deal with post mortem human subjects. You would much rather have crush s st dummies that basically replicate the same things. But we're still a long way off from that. It's just on the horizon. They're

starting to work on it now. But one other thing I saw, Chuck is they may not ever become widely used because three D modeling is so it's so rapidly advancing that all of this will probably in the next fifteen years. They will do crash test still, but it will be once, and it will be after running tons of computer simulations, and then they will just do it once in like the real world to make sure that

the computer is right. But it'll probably all become virtual pretty soon because we're getting we're getting really good at at modeling humans getting good at modeling traffic accidents. So you put them together and you can kind of test cars based on the parameters that you just feed and you just make measurements on the cars and feed it into the computer and press enter and sit back, and

you know, maybe have a Clark Bar. I was just in uh, northern California, in San Francisco, go in Wine Country, and just in San Francisco for the night. But in that one evening walking around, I saw probably four different um, I can't remember what it's called, but the Google self driving car concepts, the death car driving around town. Yeah, what's it called US? I can't remember, but I just saw this car with like a big thing on the

roof with like a spinner in it. And at first I thought it was a like maybe Google Earth or something or street view, and uh, I looked up what it was, and it is. It is a self driving concept car and they had people in them driving. Obviously at this stage I was like, wait a minute, no one's in that car. But it was definitely you know, when you walk around San Francisco, that's the testing ground

for all that kind of stuff, so it's very interesting. Um. All right, so you got those accelerometers, you have load sensors, uh, they're gonna measure the amount of force during a crash. You have movement sensors um that you know, they're gonna sense the movement of the body and everything it's doing.

And the really important thing within all this, and I think we talked about this in one of the other episodes, is these dummies are painted up and they're painted in the different body parts are painted with different colors, and

it's it's pretty ingenious. Actually, something is an idea as simple as that can tell you so much because when they go to look in that car afterward and they see, you know, there's red paint here and there's blue paint there, they're gonna be like, well, how did that knee hit that part of the car, because that's the only place where there's blue paint is on the kneecap. I guess we got to figure this out. And so they look at the scuff marks and they can tell exactly what

body part hit exactly what car part. I love that too, that we're just getting so much more advanced, but good old fashioned, like you know, putting pain or chalk on on the face to see what it hits is still just as useful as ever. All Right, So how did these crashes go? Oh? Well, there's a few things that you gotta do first. Um so, the the when when they're carrying out these crashes, the um ii h s uh.

The insurance Institute for Highway Safety and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in the United States, those are the two groups that carry out the most crash testing. And they're both independent and they go buy their own cars and they just test them and then they tell everybody what the results are, and they have their own rating systems. And we'll talk about all that in a minute. But the i h S. One of the first things they

do is UM. They basically gout the car like they'll put they'll take the UM well, all the vital fluids out, I should say, they take out the anti freeze, they take out the oil, they take out the fuel, and then they replace it with like mineral spirits so that it still has the same weight and everything UM because it can be a pretty big mess when when you're carrying out one of these tests and there's no reason

to get any is all over the place. You can go look and make a pretty good estimation of what it would have looked like just because the hose was ripped off. You don't need to see the anti freeze all over the floor, right, So they'll actually prep the car to get it ready. They measure it, they weigh it UM and they wanted to be as close to like a real life situation as possible, so they'll put

different dummies UM in the car. Sometimes they fill it out with, you know, an adult male, fifty percentile male, fifth percentile female in the passenger UM, another fifth percent female in the in the back UM, and then the

car is ready to go, they put it. They put all sorts of cameras all over the car as well as sensors to UM and they have all sorts of high speed UH cameras filming the whole thing as well, because you know, just like painting the face of the crash test dummy is really important, you know, using your eyes, like visually inspecting what happens. You as the human engineer, seeing this with your own eyes. There's stuff that you're gonna see that just wouldn't wouldn't be translated from the

data that the sensors are picking up on the dummies. Yeah, and you if you're at home or driving your car right now, and you're thinking, well, wait a minute, guys, if they're taking all the gasoline and the oil out of the car, how does it go forward? When they dropped the cinder block on the accelerator and shut the door really fast and jump out of the way. Um,

they're not doing that. The car doesn't have to be started, it doesn't have to be running because the car is on a track and it is being pulled down a runway. And that all makes complete sense that this is operated by Pulley and not by an actual car being started

and driven. All they need to know is that this thing is going to go thirty five into that wall or I guess in the case of the insurance group, I think they go forty right, so they get a little bit faster and they do different kinds of impacts they go. You know, I think the the for many many years, the gold standard was the head on collision, and so they have built cars over the years to withstand as best as possible that head on collision with

another car or hitting that brick wall straight on. Like we've all seen the videos and and you think, yeah, that's the worst of the worst. Of course, that's what you should prepare for, but it's pretty cool. The Um, what's the name of the insurance group in the eye, the i h S the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. Yeah, they started saying, and a lot of stuff was overhauled

in ten. They started saying things like, well, maybe the worst crash is when two people are trying to turn through an intersection, or your left headlight meets up with their left head light and there's like just a bit of overlap and it's not a head on collision. Like, we're building these for a head on collisions, and what if there are weak points at these corners and they're right, that is a real danger. So they have found out through these crash tests of these partial uh not layovers

what do they call them overlaps? Yeah, instead of a full head on collision, they were learning that some of those crashes can be worse, and so we need to start testing that stuff. And like, maybe it's not a straight t bone into the side of the car. You think of that as the worst thing, but what if it's forward a little bit or backward a little bit from that point? Yeah, Or you know if if you're

doing a head on collision. It's so rare that two cars run perfectly, yeah, like like hood ornament to hood ornament, This is not how it happens. It's usually like, you know, the front bumper of one car into the other, and

you know the car the auto industry. Car makers have been creating these crumple zones in the front that we're relying on, you know, that full front impact that the crash testers were testing for so that they could meet those standards, but they really weren't designing for the other

real world stuff. And so the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the i h S started tested, making their tests a little differently, and all of a sudden, the automakers started not getting the marks that they were before, and so they kind of were forced to scramble to keep up, as we'll see, which is pretty great because it really shows that the people who run these crash tests and who actually do this work care about you and your family. When you're driving around in a car.

They're not sitting on their laurels. Or they are. But then they eventually stopped sitting on their laurels and like rechallenge everybody again. Yeah, I think they were. They found that a lot of those sort of um diagonal hits were causing a lot of like pretty catastrophic leg injuries, right, and so they had to kind of reconfigure things um inside the car. And you know, modern cards are so you know, I think I bought my first new car of my life a few years ago when I bought

my Volvo. And um, you know, balbos are known for their safety anyway, and um, these things, I mean, they have all sort of an all. Most modern cars on the market now have these where they're breaking automatically for you and they're helping you stay in your lane and all that stuff. But you know, if you do a certain move in this car, um, your seat belt is called pretension. They have pretension ers and the seat belt that will tighten down on you right before an impact.

And I've had that thing tightened down on me before, man, and it's a little disconcerting, Like, you know, it's for your safety, but when you're not expecting it and you don't get into a crash and all of a sudden, you're like and your seat belt cranks down on you. Um. They also have something called a forced limitter that is going to work in hand in hand with that pretension or to make sure that they you know, it doesn't just pretension through your chest into the back seat and

so that all happens just before the air bag. It's all timed out like by the millisecond to tighten down that seat belt to try and keep you from going forward at all, and then the air bag comes out, so when you do go forward, even that'll and you know, you can listen to the airbags episode for all the detail there, but they work hand in hand to make sure you that you're slowing that kinetic energy down as

slowly and evenly as you can. They work hand in de gloved hand hand and grass And yeah, you could you like seat belts that do things like that? You like airbags? Thank crash testers who basically created who demonstrated the need for that, and automakers responded because people who buy cars like you and me said, oh, yeah, I'd like to to live. Yeah, I think my car even has it has a built in booster seat in the middle for my daughter, which she's finally old enough to

ride in. And when that seat is unhooked and engage, you just kind of pop a little lever and push it into place. It's uh, the side curtain air bags raise so because they know that the air bag will hit the child in a in a safer way basically because the kid is in there. It's really it's amazing, like how much how far safety has come well inside

impact airbags. And there was another development that that came out of crash testing too, was not just the existence of side impact airbags, but you know once those were created, they were they they came about because of the crash testers suddenly doing like t bone testing, like side impact tests. But now they've also realized that, um, if you hit like the front corner of your car, like saying a

telephone pole, Um, it's going to spin you around. You're gonna start rotating around the telephone pole, and you might slide off of that front airbag coming out of your

your steering wheel. So what they and they saw that on crash tests without a side impact right, so that they realized they went to the automakers and said, hey, you should probably have the side impact curtains come down when there's this front bumper impact to like on a telephone poll, because people are going to slide off and you want the side impact or bag to be there as well. Yeah, and then the stressed out engineer says, well, maybe the whole car should just be one giant airbag.

Would that make you happy? Get out of here. That was a great stressed out engineer impression. And then the uh the people say, yeah, actually, that's not a bad idea to put him everywhere. Who was that? Was it? Dennis Leary? What that was? A stand up comedian who's like, won't they should just all beside? They should all just be really I think so, Well, that just shows how easy it can be to steal a bit. Yeah accidentally, right, yea, you owe Dennis Leary five dollars? All right, I'll pay

him right after this ad break. Okay, well, now we're on the road, driving in your truck. Want to learn a thing or two from Josh Chuck stuff you should know? All right? Okay, so we never really said what happens in the in the crash test. Um. There's a few different ones that are carried out, depending on whether you're hanging around the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's crash testing site or the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety's crash test site,

but they're very similar. Um. A lot of people look to the i h S is maybe being the gold standard and the Safety Administration is being more government bureaucracy, but they're both doing pretty good work. If you, um, both of them really rely on the front crash because those happen a lot, and when they do happen, they can have pretty serious consequences for the passengers of the car.

So the Traffic Safety Administration they do they do one UM and there is a full impact where they drag the car at thirty five hour into a concrete barrier and the whole, the whole hood, the whole front bumper is involved in the impact the i h S And this is one reason why they're kind of looked at ISS maybe being a little better. Um. They they do parts where the front bumper only a percentage is used,

and they do two different crash tests. They do one where of the front bumper so it would be like left headlight to left headlight kind of crash head on collision. And then they do another one that's that involves more of the bumper and UM one of them. Well yeah, and I think the Traffic Safety Administration does those as well. Now right, Okay, so they got on board. Yeah, finally they said, okay, we really need to kind of consider this because will do run into um, a pole, a

telephone pole once in a while. Like they're these these groups are trying to recreate real world scenarios as much as possible to see how cars hold up, you know. Yeah, and again to reiterate, the I I h S does an extra five miles per hour forty as opposed to thirty five. UM. There is an injury classification system, UH that's used from one to six, one being minor cuts and bruises all the way up to fatal. And that

is not the star rating. That's just totally dealing with the kind of injuries that somebody may like the likelihood of what kind of injuries is what they're trying to

measure at least. Yeah, there was a group called the UM American or no, the Association for Advancement of Automotive Medicine that came up with that scale, the abbreviated Injury scale, and there is a lot that goes into it, and they were kind enough to basically create a handbook that they shared with these car testers and car makers UM so that they could they could take this data and translate it into injuries so they could say, like, oh, well, the crash test dummy had a load of you know,

five million Newton's on what would be the femur, and so the femur would have just snapped in eight pieces so that would be this number, and so that that abbreviated Injuries Report UM is taken into account and translated further into the rating systems because the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration basically looks at how the car holds up in producing injuries, and then the i h S looks at how the car holds up and crashes as far

as injuries goes. And then also the other UM, the other occupant um safety stuff too, like like the seatbelts, the airbags, all of that stuff, right, And you mentioned in is when things and it's it's kind of horrifying to think of they were doing good work up until. It's not like it was it's willy nilly or anything. But when you look at all the changes they've made since, you're kind of like, man, it took that long to start considering some of this stuff because it still seems

a little behind the curve even with the updates. Yeah, as far as body types and all that stuff, for sure. Um, So they change things in the new star ratings came out in eleven, and cars that were previously getting four and five star ratings in every category, in all of a sudden, we're getting like three stars maybe or maybe even two stars under the new system. And that's because they have these new injury parameters. They're adding these different

tests now, um they're using the different size dummies. They're now using that again, that small adult female instead of the five ten one seventy email. Who if I ever weigh literally a hundred, because I'm about five ten. If ever weigh a hundreds eventy on the nose, I don't know that. I'm either going to try and gain five or lose five. I don't want to be one seventy on the nose. Okay, you don't want to be median.

I get that. I don't want to, And hey, I'm doing a great job so far, nowhere close to right. You're just playing it safe. Yeah yeah, But if I go in some massive weight loss campaign, I'm gonna I'm gonna stop at like one eighty and be like I like a little chunk around the middle. That's what I'm going for is one eight as well? Maybe yeah that's a good way. But you're you're like six ft though, right,

I am five ft eleven and a half. It just irks me and getting smaller, yeah, just like the average mail yep, you'll be five ten one day, my friend. Do you think so? Now? Probably not that short. But I used to be a solid five tin and now I'm like five note and a half. What happens? What are you're just getting compressed? I don't know. I think that's a good uh. I mean you shrink as you get older. That's a good shorty, I think, Okay, why do you shrink? I don't know. We'll have to find

out and tell everybody. Uh. Some of the other key parts of the post is uh. The NHTSA started assigning a single overall safety score from front side and rollover, with front having the heaviest weight of that overall score. They started started putting in these additional measures for uh, for neck extension, chest deflection, and femur and I think they didn't have that before, which is kind of horrifying. Uh. What else? I think they added the poll test? Yeah,

running into polls. It's a big one too. One of the things that they did that really change things is that rather than just getting an absolute score based on their criteria, they started pitting cars against one another. Two. Oh yeah, that's a that's a huge one. That was an enormous change because now they're like, okay, you want to be the best, well you've got to be the best in the industry. You can't just be like, you know, yes,

we're all going to meet this. And that was one reason why those two thousand ten changes were aid and one reason why the i h S keeps changing its tests. They're not like like any time they they they create a new test or they create a new standard, all of the automakers rushed to meet that UM and some of them may already meet it or come close. They won't have to do too much to meet those higher standards because they're already over designing beyond what were the

requirements before. But the rest of the industry, if you don't know by now, just from like our Pinto episode alone, the auto industry is really lazy sometimes when it comes to overdesigning UM. They will sometimes meet minimum requirements even when they're exceeding minimum requirements. And this is a good example of that because with the n h T S A, when they're doing crash tests, they're basically just doing it for fun. This is again not this is not law.

Like you can get a one star rating from the n h T A T S A and you're fine, like it just looks bad to your consumer. But the fact that it looks bad you're consumed humor means that the automaker will scramble to try to get that five star rating. But then they'll they'll hack it, they'll figure it out, Like all we have to do is focus on the whole front crumple zone. We don't have to worry about the driver's side of the passenger side of

the bumper. We just have to worry about the whole front because that's what the n h T s A does when they're doing tests, and if we can meet that standard, we'll get that five stars. Well, when the n h T s A and the i h S change their standards all of a sudden, the industry has to scramble to catch up to become like that gold standard.

And they do it again and again and again to keep safety getting better and better and better, and then also finding new things that had been overlooked before to make those parts of cars safer as well, which is pretty cool. I mean, like this is again, this is superfectly. None of this is mandated. It's not mandatory. No one, no car maker has to cement us. They actually don't even have a choice because these agencies are going and

buying their own cars and crashing them. And there's nothing legal about that, um, but they just the fact that somebody's out there doing this, I think is just such a great It's just a great example of people caring about other people. Yeah, and you know, it's gotten to the point where if you have a newer car with the air bags and such and safety standards and you and you wear your seat belt. Um, there are outliers, of course, with just these horrific car wrecks that do happen.

But if you're just talking about a standard, even bad car crash, you are gonna fare pretty well these days thanks to the work that all these people have done over the years. Um, again, there are outliers, but uh,

they have made cars really, really incredibly safe. Um to get into what I would just describe as sort of a normal car wreck and not a fender bender, like you know, a carrect that even might look pretty gnarly, and you see him on the road, you know, you see two cars You're like, oh my gosh, and you see people standing outside like giving the officer there you know, the account of what happened, and you're just like, man, there it is right there, Like those people are are

standing there talking to somebody, whereas you know, two decades ago they were probably you know, maybe not even alive. Which is just a testament to all the work they've done. Um one way, they really need to ramp it up. And I couldn't tell if they are actually even doing this testing yet, but some of that stuff you sent pointed out says that like there's still sort of crashing

similar cars into one another. Oh yeah, that's a big one, and that's a big deal these days when you've got these you know what happens when a suburban crashes into a Honda Civic. Um, these are two very much mismatched cars, not just in overall size, but bumper height is a big deal, and these bumpers are made to hit one another and then operate accordingly from there. If a bumper is going over the other bumper, uh, we often happens in these cases of a big suv or a big

truck compared to a smaller car. Uh. That this is where you're going to see a lot of like kind of bad injuries happening. And I don't know if they're actually testing for that, if they're just talking about, like, hey, what do we need to do to test the stuff right exactly? UM. I don't know if they are yet either, but they seem to be on the precipice, if not another one. Um. Another criticism I've seen of both groups is that they're they're testing these at thirty five miles

an hour forty miles an hour. Everybody's like, well, I'll drive a heck of a lot faster than forty miles an hour. What would my car doing sixty, you know, or seventy or eighty something like that. Um, And that's a that is a big criticism. The both agencies pushed back and say, this is this is where most of

the accidents happen. I'm sure they're basing that in statistics, and I would probably tend to say, okay, yes, but what about the you know, maybe that's fifty one percent, but what about the fort that is, you know, much faster than that. And I think if they did start crash testing at higher speeds, cars would be showing to be kind of pitiful and in handling that, and maybe

automakers would start to scramble to catch up to that too. Well, yeah, because they're kind of working on the assumption, which may be correct, that most of these wrecks are happening in like neighborhoods and not necessarily on the expressway. But what about the guy who's driving sixty through the neighborhood. You know, they're they're saying like this, this is assuming people are

driving the speed limit, which is not the case. And we have a street very near my house that is, uh, you know, it's not a highway, but people drive like it's a highway because it's really long and straight and sort of runs between all these residential neighborhood streets, and you know, people go sixty seventy. It's just ridiculously. No, dude, I've extra this like point where I've turned into an old,

middle aged and screamed, too fast in your neighborhood. Hellow down somebody driving too asked it's it's man, and it is very like I can't, I can't help it. I

can't not do it. Yeah, And I live um near an intersection, and there's a curve in my street before the intersection, so people will come around the curve and if they see the lightest green, they will just hammer it to try and make that light, and like all of a sudden they're going like literally like fifty miles in front of my house, and I just, man, it makes me so mad. Yeah, I'm with you. It's so angry about that stuff. There's just no point because well

it's because it's you know, you know the deal. Sure, people driving that fast to save what ends up being thirty seconds to the stoplight. It's just when you outweigh risks and what you're gaining, Like, even if you think you're in a hurry, you're really not. In the end getting there that much quicker, like a minute or two isn't that big of a difference. And it's just it's unnerming that people take that kind of risk just to make a light. Nice. Nice, don't do it people. That's

my soapbox moment. Yeah, I think you just stay up there on that soapbox, buddy. That is a big one. Can I come down to P No, you've made your bed, now you have to stand in it. P in it? You got anything else? I got nothing else. I got one more thing. One of the reasons why I also love the I h S is the highest possible rating you could get from them is just good, yeah, poor, marginal acceptable, and then good? How do we do good? Nothing?

Nothing better, no exclamation points, no comfetti. Uh. Well, since Chuck and I both said good, that means, of course, everybody's time for a listener mail. Uh. This is from our Trepid Nation episode, which just dropped today in real time. Hey guys, I was listening to the episode on tree panning, and I feel like I am such adult. I literally had never thought of craniotomies? Is the modern version of uh tree penning? Treppening? What did we end up with

tree panning? I don't know. Trip tree painting doesn't sound familiar trip panning, even though I knew about the ancient practice. This is really funny because I had a craniotomy. I have a Chiari malformation syndrome. I have kilary. I think it's c H I a r I, and I bet you it's not Ri. You gotta say it like an Italian person. Chi malformation syndrome, and part of decompression surgery

was a crany craniotomy. This totally computes with the idea of ancient people using trip panning to relieve chronic headaches. Since one of Ki's main symptoms is terrible, terrible, constant headaches. Something else you said in the episode helped me make sense of something my neurosurgeon said too. When discussing the diagnosis and what the decompression surgery would achieve, he briefly said that some people think of surgery actually can help

cure depression, even though there's no evidence. I had never heard of that and certainly wasn't looking for that for that case. Myself just wanted to stop falling over. But you mentioned in the episode that there were a lot of internet rumors that trepanning can help with depression, So now I know why he said that. Anyway, there's a fun I've said listen to and kind of see myself in. So thanks for that. Keep up the good stuff that is from Amanda. Awesome, Amanda. I'm really glad we could

kind of connect the pieces for you. Yeah, and I hope you're doing well. Yeah, me too. I hope you're not following over any longer and you don't have headaches. Agreed. If you want to get in touch with us, like Amanda did, then you can send us an email to Stuff Podcast at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.