More Than Living

The Mini, and 50 years of car safety

Fellow petrol-​​heads are prob­ably famil­iar with the Good­wood Revival – a yearly event which cel­eb­rates the Sussex circuit’s racing his­tory, and that of the cars which once com­peted there. Reg­u­lar read­ers will know that I’ve a soft spot for old motors, find­ing many new ones a bit dull.

And so it is that Friday found me and my dad watch­ing a col­lec­tion of price­less vin­tage motors ham­mer­ing it around a vin­tage cir­cuit in the Sussex coun­tryside. Thor­oughly enjoy­able it was, too, par­tic­u­larly as this year marks the Mini’s 50^th birth­day, cel­eb­rated at the week­end with a two-​​part one-​​make race series.

But a recent crash test con­duc­ted in Amer­ica reminds me that the Mini, like my beloved VW, really does belong to a dif­fer­ent era when it comes to safety.

The test in ques­tion, con­duc­ted by the Insur­ance Insti­tute for High­way Safety (IIHS), pitted a 1959 Chev­ro­let Bel Air against a 2009 Chev­ro­let Mailbu in an offset frontal col­li­sion. And the result isn’t pretty for either car.

But the most shock­ing part is the IIHS assess­ment of what would have happened to two drivers involved in such an acci­dent: the driver of the 2009 Malibu would be nurs­ing “slight knee injury”.

The older car’s driver would be dead.

(via Jalopnik)

Sim­ilar Posts:

• Good­wood Fest­ival of Speed 2008
• Car v plane: which wins on speed, safety, emis­sions and cost?
• New cars: safe for occu­pants, not for pedestrians?
• Engine stop-​​​​start sys­tems save fuel at traffic lights
• The UK’s strangest safety tips

Ori­gin­ally posted 2009-​​09-​​24 03:22:00. Repub­lished by Blog Post Promoter

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