http://www.autoblog.com/2013/07/03/watching-iihs-test-semi-trailers-for-safety-is-frightening/#continued
Woah.
http://www.autoblog.com/2013/07/03/watching-iihs-test-semi-trailers-for-safety-is-frightening/#continued
Woah.
Yeah, toward the end on the 30% offset I was thinking, "Oh the airbag is gonna sav.................oh, guess not."
OK
No more hypermiling behind semis for me
Great post! Interesting stuff. Looks like the effort to duplicate the best design out of the 8 on all trailers would be minimal and inexpensive. Considering that, there doesnt seem to be much downside to updating the national regulations to achieve that.
No more hypermiling behind semis for me
Ive often said that being behind a semi is one of the safest places to be because you can ALWAYS outstop a semi... unless you're asleep i guess. But following different types of vehicles would not be my first step in addressing that..
Vigo wrote: Ive often said that being behind a semi is one of the safest places to be because you can ALWAYS outstop a semi... ..
Don't think that. Having driven commercial, I can assure that when empty or only partially full, those 18 wheels provide a -lot- of stopping force. Empty they can probably outbrake most cars. Add to that the fact you cannot see ahead of the truck to see what traffic might be doing and it is a recipe for disaster and death.
Showdown, then.. Who wants to bring a semi and take me up?
If adding weight to a vehicle was totally offset by adding more braked wheels to it, some people would go around towing empty braked trailers just to improve their stopping power. In reality it doesn't work that way.
I made a bet to a guy with a new Tundra that one of my cars towing my empty dolley could outbrake his truck towing an empty braked ~18ft trailer. He didn't take me up, but i'm happy to try!
Vigo wrote: Great post! Interesting stuff. Looks like the effort to duplicate the best design out of the 8 on all trailers would be minimal and inexpensive. Considering that, there doesnt seem to be much downside to updating the national regulations to achieve that.No more hypermiling behind semis for meIve often said that being behind a semi is one of the safest places to be because you can ALWAYS outstop a semi... unless you're asleep i guess. But following different types of vehicles would not be my first step in addressing that..
You just have to be really, really close. Run 4' off the back bumper, what are the odds of him hitting anything solid enough to stop him instantly?
OH NOES!! WE IZ ALL GUNNA DIE WHEN WE ARE ON TEH ROADZ!!!!
Well duh! Just a look at how badly bent up those underriders are. Doesn't take much to figure out you don't ever want to rear end a semi trailer.
If you're following at a safe (read: non-tailgating) distance in a passenger car, and your car can't stop fast enough to not hit a tractor trailer, the trailer's safety bar is not the problem.
I've been directly behind a trailer doing an emergency stop (rural mountain highway, around a bend, and a landslide/avalanche had just come down around the corner at the end of winter). This was in my Maxima, and I was following pretty close at the time as I was looking to make a pass. When he stomped the brakes I saw the rear wheels lock up and the truck cocked slightly sideways to where I could see the rear wheels of the cab as well. I had no trouble stopping behind him even without doing a full "panic stop".
So, I don't really buy that a semi with a trailer is going to stop faster than a car with functional brakes and decent tires. But I've been wrong before.
scare tactic video that - at the very end - reveals the true objective
"but in the long run, there's a chance that the regulations could be re-written..."
Repeat after me: "X is unsafe, and there ought to be a law...."
x={pinto, corvair, trailer....anything without ABS, TPS, traction control, backup cameras}
Insurance people scaring the world. The best part here is the dramatic side by side photo at 1:39
It works well....really scary. If you are not paying close attention, you may not notice the lettering on the sides of the trailer. That letters seems to indicate that the top video a 2012 Hyundai trailer, and the bottom is a 2007 Hyundai.
Why does this matter? Because at 1:46 Sean O'Mally is talking about purchasing and testing eight brand new trailers. The (false) implication is that the horrible-safety trailer at the bottom is one of those eight modern trailers. that is probably not the case.
This leads me to wonder what revised regulations the insurance industry shills are pushing.....my guess is that they're advocating a retrofit-or-ban regulation aimed at transportation companies.
I'm not saying that the insurance industry should not advocate such a program (It would benefit them financially and save lives) but I dislike the idea using what appears to be an older trailer as part of the video. It looks like, Hyundai has changed, moved on, and is already making safer trailers. My guess is that the other seven manufacturers have, too. If not, the insurance guys would have used two different manufacturers' 2012 trailers in their comparison shot.
I like to see them test a Miata or a Smart Car.
JoeyM wrote: scare tactic video that - at the very end - reveals the true objective"but in the long run, there's a chance that the regulations could be re-written..."Repeat after me: "X is unsafe, and there ought to be a law...." x={pinto, corvair, trailer....anything without ABS, TPS, traction control, backup cameras} Insurance people scaring the world. The best part here is the dramatic side by side photo at 1:39
I don't think the old trailer was actually "in" the video as one of the tested trailers.. All the parts that I saw had trailers with the low bumper bar, unless I missed something. I think that was to show how the current regulations were a big improvement on how it was in 2007 (which is certainly true).
The main problem with hitting a truck vs hitting another car: If you rear-end another car, it's going to move to some extent, which takes some of the kinetic energy out of the impact. If you rear-end a truck, it's not really going to move so a 35mph smash into the rear of a trailer (even with bumper bar) is going to be a lot more impact penetration than 35mph into the rear of a Honda Civic....
the thing they really should be worried about is the guys with the lifted trucks and jeeps that have their stock bumpers. Pretty much every day in traffic there is a jacked up wrangler or a lifted F250 or something else where the bumper is sitting at the top of my trunk (if not above)...and that's in the WRX which has a tall trunk.
I worry way more about those big monsters smashing into the back of me than I worry about me running into a big rig. I've owned Jeeps, I know precisely how bad their brakes are, especially trying to stop 32s or 35s.....
In reply to irish44j:
This!
They forgot the most important part which is that these accidents happened while drivers were texting or adjusting the radio not ready to stop their cars anyway
Some states (PA) have laws regulating the minimum bumper height for lifted trucks. In PA, it's 30" to pass inspection.
I've seen first hand what can happen when a car goes under a trailer at speed. It was about 8 years ago on Rt 1 in New Brunswick NJ. A truck was parked on the shoulder and a 4-dr Cadillac had buried itself up to the rear window under the trailer. I saw the accident before a majority of help had arrived to block the view (during the lengthy recovery process, they put up tarps to block the scene from passing traffic) - it was obvious the driver was killed on impact. Unfortunately, no one will ever know why he was driving so fast down the shoulder and why he didn't see the truck.
Since trailers don't have things like center brake lights to catch attention of the average appliance user, a semi-attentive driver might not notice a braking or stopped truck until it's too late for them to stop in time. While improving the trailer guards won't prevent every submarine incident (like the one I mentioned), it could help survivability during those "oh crap!" situations where a split second is the difference between stopping in time and contact.
irish44j wrote: the thing they really should be worried about is the guys with the lifted trucks and jeeps that have their stock bumpers. Pretty much every day in traffic there is a jacked up wrangler or a lifted F250 or something else where the bumper is sitting at the top of my trunk (if not above)...and that's in the WRX which has a tall trunk. I worry way more about those big monsters smashing into the back of me than I worry about me running into a big rig. I've owned Jeeps, I know precisely how bad their brakes are, especially trying to stop 32s or 35s.....
Yes exactly. I feel pretty confident that I can stop in time to prevent an impact with a semi tractor trailer in front but it's the lifted vehicle from behind that is worrisome, especially when the bumper is even with my head when driving the Miata.
Ian F wrote: Some states (PA) have laws regulating the minimum bumper height for lifted trucks. In PA, it's 30" to pass inspection.
I think pretty much all states have them. But they seem to be enforced about as much as the laws that make straight pipes on Harleys and American V8 cars illegal....not at all.
The only time I ever see lifted/big pickups with drop-down bumpers is when they are corporate vehicles, or commercially-tagged (making them, in theory, subject to stricter enforcement).
I'll note that I'm being a bit hypocritical since my XJ had 31s and a 2" lift and the bumper was a couple inches above the "legal" height as well. And it never failed state inspection, even at the strict places that used to get my stock Integra for stupid piddly E36 M3....
Another story from years ago. I lived in Italy for a few years in high school, and as I recall ALL tractor-trailers in Italy had very low rear bumpers (I remember seeing them drag the bumpers on some driveway transitions and stuff, so they were really low).
On a bus trip, middle of the night on the Autostrade it was foggy as hell. Our bus was going like 20kph. On this part of the Autostrade there were really no shoulders to speak of, just two lanes and about half a shoulder. We came up on an accident scene from only a few minutes before. IN the pea-soup fog a truck had stopped on the side of the road (basically, across the entire right lane and the tiny shoulder).
Some Italian in what appeared to be a Fiat Uno was apparently happily charging along at high speed in the fog, in the right lane, and ran directly into the back of the truck. I recall it vividly because of three factors:
It was a four-door Uno. The rear door and back were unscathed and I read the badge on it. Forward of the B-piller, nothing existed. The car was crushed in like a beer can you smash on the ground.
The driver was on the ground next to the car. The steering wheel was literally impaled in his midsection, with the broken steerling column sticking up in the air.
The passenger, we saw a few moments later, had somehow ended up about 20 feet IN FRONT of the tractor-trailer and was already covered by a sheet. No clue how that happened.
Anyhow, I also remember that the truck had a very low rear bumper, in typical Italian style decorated with about 20 bright-orange Kappa-logo stickers. No major part of the car went much past the vertical plane of the rear of the trailer. The bar was actually still intact and straight down.
No real moral to this story about truck bumpers, but never really had a reason to tell it before. I guess the moral is.....if you hit the back of a truck at high speed, you're pretty much screwed regardless of what the bumper is ;)
Ian F wrote: Some states (PA) have laws regulating the minimum bumper height for lifted trucks. In PA, it's 30" to pass inspection. I've seen first hand what can happen when a car goes under a trailer at speed. It was about 8 years ago on Rt 1 in New Brunswick NJ. A truck was parked on the shoulder and a 4-dr Cadillac had buried itself up to the rear window under the trailer. I saw the accident before a majority of help had arrived to block the view (during the lengthy recovery process, they put up tarps to block the scene from passing traffic) - it was obvious the driver was killed on impact. Unfortunately, no one will ever know why he was driving so fast down the shoulder and why he didn't see the truck. Since trailers don't have things like center brake lights to catch attention of the average appliance user, a semi-attentive driver might not notice a braking or stopped truck until it's too late for them to stop in time. While improving the trailer guards won't prevent every submarine incident (like the one I mentioned), it could help survivability during those "oh crap!" situations where a split second is the difference between stopping in time and contact.
i drive a 120 mile stretch of I94 on a pretty regular basis, and i've always kind of wondered why they don't mandate a center brake/taillight in the rear of the trailer... some of those guys put a zillion lights on their rigs, but they never put a couple of them down low in the middle of the back of the trailer right at eye level for those of us that are driving passenger cars on their roads for some reason.
sometimes there is reflective tape there, but reflective tape only works at night and doesn't light up when the driver hits the brakes. maybe the lights would just get broken out on loading docks??
novaderrik wrote:Ian F wrote: Some states (PA) have laws regulating the minimum bumper height for lifted trucks. In PA, it's 30" to pass inspection. I've seen first hand what can happen when a car goes under a trailer at speed. It was about 8 years ago on Rt 1 in New Brunswick NJ. A truck was parked on the shoulder and a 4-dr Cadillac had buried itself up to the rear window under the trailer. I saw the accident before a majority of help had arrived to block the view (during the lengthy recovery process, they put up tarps to block the scene from passing traffic) - it was obvious the driver was killed on impact. Unfortunately, no one will ever know why he was driving so fast down the shoulder and why he didn't see the truck. Since trailers don't have things like center brake lights to catch attention of the average appliance user, a semi-attentive driver might not notice a braking or stopped truck until it's too late for them to stop in time. While improving the trailer guards won't prevent every submarine incident (like the one I mentioned), it could help survivability during those "oh crap!" situations where a split second is the difference between stopping in time and contact.i drive a 120 mile stretch of I94 on a pretty regular basis, and i've always kind of wondered why they don't mandate a center brake/taillight in the rear of the trailer... some of those guys put a zillion lights on their rigs, but they never put a couple of them down low in the middle of the back of the trailer right at eye level for those of us that are driving passenger cars on their roads for some reason. sometimes there is reflective tape there, but reflective tape only works at night and doesn't light up when the driver hits the brakes. maybe the lights would just get broken out on loading docks??
That's exactly why. My office overlooks the loading docks and the truckers are constantly bumping it while backing.
mad_machine wrote:Vigo wrote: Ive often said that being behind a semi is one of the safest places to be because you can ALWAYS outstop a semi... ..Don't think that. Having driven commercial, I can assure that when empty or only partially full, those 18 wheels provide a -lot- of stopping force. Empty they can probably outbrake most cars. Add to that the fact you cannot see ahead of the truck to see what traffic might be doing and it is a recipe for disaster and death.
I very, very seriously doubt an unloaded semi could outbrake even a modern Toyota Corolla.
The main reason you shouldn't tailgate a semi is blowouts or kicking up debris. A semi tire going at highway speed......you could easily just shattered your window along with getting your hood/fender/headlight. Or any piece of debris like a 2x4 (or the ladder I drove past on the way home today) would likely get kicked up, or even if it didn't get kicked up, you would be unlikely to have time to react and take evasive maneuvers.
I think its interesting most people jump to the argument that a semi should never outbrake a car anyway. I'm betting a lot of deaths are from people hitting semi-trailers that are parked on the shoulder, pull out in front, etc. You know, situations where the semi's braking capacity isn't a factor.
Yes, in most situations, its the driver of the car at fault. I look at it like the increase in safety is huge for a very minimal increase in manufacturing cost and/or regulation.
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