<story><title>How do cars fare in crash tests they&apos;re not specifically optimized for? (2020)</title><url>https://danluu.com/car-safety/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ericpauley</author><text>&amp;gt; All of those models scored Good on the driver side small overlap test, indicating that when Honda increased the safety on the driver&amp;#x27;s side to score Good on the driver&amp;#x27;s side test, they didn&amp;#x27;t apply the same changes to the passenger side.&lt;p&gt;This is an especially concerning observation for Honda. I&amp;#x27;m curious if there&amp;#x27;s any more detail on this or if there&amp;#x27;s a plausible reason aside from gaming the benchmarks (e.g., the positioning of firewall-forward components might naturally favor small-overlap protection on the driver&amp;#x27;s side, or a steering-wheel mounted airbag would naturally perform better than dash-mounted).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mywittyname</author><text>The small overlap test is designed for situations where cars hit one-another, head on, on a narrow two lane road.  So making changes only to the driver&amp;#x27;s side makes some sense here, because it&amp;#x27;s always the driver&amp;#x27;s sides that impact in this test.  It&amp;#x27;s less &amp;quot;optimizing for the test&amp;quot; and more &amp;quot;optimizing for results&amp;quot;, as these accidents used to be the most deadly type of accidents.&lt;p&gt;Additionally, this is a really, really difficult test to pass, which is why everyone failed it.  Even the revisions didn&amp;#x27;t help too much because there&amp;#x27;s not much that can be done to an existing chassis other than add a deflection bar or something.  True success here requires ground up engineering.</text></comment>
<story><title>How do cars fare in crash tests they&apos;re not specifically optimized for? (2020)</title><url>https://danluu.com/car-safety/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ericpauley</author><text>&amp;gt; All of those models scored Good on the driver side small overlap test, indicating that when Honda increased the safety on the driver&amp;#x27;s side to score Good on the driver&amp;#x27;s side test, they didn&amp;#x27;t apply the same changes to the passenger side.&lt;p&gt;This is an especially concerning observation for Honda. I&amp;#x27;m curious if there&amp;#x27;s any more detail on this or if there&amp;#x27;s a plausible reason aside from gaming the benchmarks (e.g., the positioning of firewall-forward components might naturally favor small-overlap protection on the driver&amp;#x27;s side, or a steering-wheel mounted airbag would naturally perform better than dash-mounted).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sokoloff</author><text>It seems like, even if intentional, that it’s a sensible optimization. Among multi-car collisions, drivers’ side small offset collisions I’d expect to be vastly more common than passenger side small offset collisions.&lt;p&gt;In both single and multi car collisions, we will assume there’s a driver in all cars, but less than 100% chance for there to be a front-seat passenger in all cars.</text></comment>