Stuff You Should Know - What's the deal with crash testing?

Episode Date: September 16, 2021

Crash testing has been around since the 1930s, but only got serious in the 1970s. Today we dive in and learn all about why companies and the U.S. government purposefully wreck cars.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Munga Chauticular and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to

believe. You can find in Major League Baseball, International Banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and there's Jerry over there and this is Stuff You Should Know, the podcast. All right, we've done one on airbags, right?

Which one did we do that was all about like the crumple zones and all that stuff? That's a great question, Chuck. I've been really trying to figure that out. I think it must have been Pentos. 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. Now 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. 80%. All right, which is we've agreed that is well above the 50% threshold that we required to possibly record. None of this seemed particularly familiar. We've definitely talked about something like crumple zones, that kind of thing, because we talked about how cars... 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. 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. All right. Forward we go. Cars have become exponentially safer than they used to be. First of all, hats off to not only the House of Forks article we're working from, but also a Consumer Reports article on crash testing that was really great, and then one from Jalopnik that was a really great one about crash testing your car. On that Jalopnik article... That's a great website. It is. It's wonderful. On that

Jalopnik article, they posted a YouTube video that made the rounds like a few years back, and it's a 2009 Malibu versus a 1959 Bel Air. Oh, yeah. They go, head on. The dummy in the Malibu is like, what? I didn't even notice anything. The person in the Bel Air just disintegrates, basically. The crash test dummy in the Bel Air just disintegrates, because cars used to be made 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 do very well in a crash test. 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 makers said, yeah, I guess we all got to start making things safe. Yeah, we would go again, go to save your lives. 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, then great, that's

kind of, we care about driving the car and not crashing the car. Why would anyone care about that? Right. And then in 1934, 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. Who knew? So maybe we should look into this. So GM held the very first barrier test at Milford Proving Ground in Michigan in 1934 with an unoccupied vehicle. And they would do this in different ways. Sometimes they would like a 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, jump out. And they said, okay, I guess that's fine.

How much are you going to pay me for that? They're like, don't worry about that. They're like, aren't you a prisoner from a chain gang? Nothing. Right. So these early tests, again, they weren't to 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. And then in 1952, 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 humanetics. 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. That's right. We talked about Sierra Sam in the Murphy's Law episode. Okay. With John Paul Sam. 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 died at the age of 90 in 2005 and was

posthumously inducted into the National Inventor Salma fame in 2013. Rightfully so. With a lot of inventions, but largely this crash test dummy patented in 1981 was the big one. Yeah. So was that the one that was called the hybrid three? The hybrid three. And this is still humanetics, by the way, that makes these. Yeah, they're like, yeah, they're like as good as it gets with crash test dummy, create design and creation. Yeah. 1988 was when the hybrid three was first developed. And then I think they upgraded it in 91 to take seatbelts into consideration. And then in 97 to take airbags into consideration. Right.

And now the standard, and we'll get to why they did this, is the H35F, meaning fifth female. So the fifth percentile size-wise female is the standard dummy 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 50th percentile male dummy. Right. 5'10", 170. Which was, yeah, 5'10", 170 pounds. And he was introduced from what I saw in 1976 at a time when the average male in the United States was 5'10", 170 pounds. Well, the average male in the United States has not been 5'10", 170 pounds for a really long time. What is it now? Do you know?

The average male's gained about 25 pounds and shrunk an inch since then. That tracks. That's the average male in the United States now. But the problem is, is like these crash testers were still using that 50th percentile male dummy, even though it didn't apply. And that's not to say anything about child dummies, female dummies. It was basically like, you know how when they test a new drug, they test it on the healthiest, least vulnerable population and then say, it works. That's exactly what the history of crash testing has done. But only in the last, I don't know, probably 10 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 70 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 in 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 16-year-old girl is 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

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. But it's still not required. There's actually a representative, a congresswoman from DC named Eleanor Holmes Norton, who just this past June introduced a bill that would require crash testers to also use female dummies too. So right now it's not required. They should use a range. Yeah. Of course they should use range. It's just sensible. And so the people who do crash testing are aware of this and they're starting to. But Chuck, there's one other thing I saw about crash test dummies. One of the things they can't replicate is tissue damage or even real damage. Like when you do crash tests, we'll talk about

a little more detail in a second. But 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 basically turn it into a statistical likelihood that that amount of force, that amount of acceleration, that amount of Gs 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 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 a human body. So some crash testing, Chuck, Chuck, some

crash testing uses postmortem human subjects. I wondered if that's where this is going. A lot of postmortem 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 that a fresh one will. And so that's a huge part of crash testing from what I can tell is using postmortem human subjects as well. Wow. That's amazing. And we should also point out, maybe we'll take a break, but before we take one, we should point out that car companies do all kinds of internal crash testing before they get to the regulatory crash testing because you don't want to fail those. So they'll crash 80 to 100 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. We should also say those official crashes, they're not even necessarily official. Basically, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has a bunch of guidelines, some of them involving crashes. And then they basically say, these are the guidelines. You car makers better meet them, but they don't go and actually test the cars for that. The crashing that they're doing is beyond the minimum the law requires. So nobody's actually testing the automakers' cars 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 what keeps the car makers honest. And then that, and then one other thing I saw from that Jalopnik article is the minimum legal standards that a car can be put out on an American road are so low that they so vastly like under meat. Under satisfy? Yes. Thank you, Charles. They so vastly under satisfy what the average American would be willing to get in and drive. What Americans want to drive as far as safety is concerned, that's what car makers are meeting, not just the minimum legal requirements. So very interesting. 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. There are tests completely separate that done by the insurance Institute for Highway Safety that are even more different and more robust. Great setup, my friend. Chuck, great setup 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. We'll be back right after this. Anyway. Well, now when you're on the road driving in your truck, why not learn a thing or two from Josh and Chuck? It's stuff you should know. All right. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough,

or you're at the end of the road. Okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep. We know that Michael and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, everybody about my new

podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular. And to be honest, I don't believe in astrology. But from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention. Because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, major league baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But

just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world can crash down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right. So we've 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, they're not like, it's not like GM says, all right, here's the car, go tell us if it's okay. It's a voluntary thing, sort of. Like, good luck selling cars if you

don't. But sure, it's voluntary. And they're loaded with sensors. Like you said, they're accelerometers. And accelerometers are going to measure acceleration in a particular direction. And they use this, obviously, to determine if you might get injured. Acceleration is the rate at which speed changes. So if you're driving a car and you, let's say there were no airbags back in the day and no seatbelts, and your head hits that windshield, the acceleration from your head flying forward to hitting not zero, because it's going to go through the windshield. But it's going to decrease really, really fast. And that rate of acceleration change is the danger. And making cars 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 to to zero. Yeah, because you and the car are both traveling the same speed, and you both have to stop pretty quickly. You want to cut down on the car transferring its kinetic energy to you, and then you want to cut down on your kinetic energy. Like if you're going to have to transfer your kinetic energy to something, let it be like an airbag 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 every body part you can think of, their accelerometers. And it's neat. Like I was saying, the crash test dummies,

the anthropomorphic test devices is what they're called in the industry, they are getting more and more biofidelic. Like they're faithful to biology is basically what that word means. And so you're finding crash test dummies that are starting to have 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 postmortem human subjects, you would much rather have crash test 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 that they may not ever become widely used because 3D modeling is so rapidly advancing that all of this will probably

in the next 15 years, they will do crash test still, but it will be once and it'll 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's right. But it'll probably all become virtual pretty soon. Because we're getting really good at modeling humans and we're 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 in, you just make measurements on the cars and feed it into the computer and press enter and sit back and maybe have a Clark bar. I was just in Northern California in San Francisco in wine country and just in San Francisco for the night, but in that one evening walking around,

I saw probably four different, I can't remember what it's called, but the Google self-driving car concepts. The death car? Driving around town. The Diablo? Yeah, what's it called? 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 I looked up what it was and it is a self-driving concept car. And they had people in them driving, obviously, at this stage. Right. 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. Sure. It's very interesting. It's great. All right. So you got those accelerometers,

you have load sensors, they're going to measure the amount of force during a crash. You have movement sensors that, you know, they're going to sense the movement of the body and everything it's doing. Yeah. 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 and the different body parts are painted with different colors. And 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 going to 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 paint or chalk 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 got to do first. So the, when they're carrying out these crashes, the IIHS, 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 IIHS, one of the first things they do is they basically gut the car. Like, they'll put, they'll take the, well, all the vital fluids out, I should say, they take out the antifreeze, 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. Sure. Because it can be a pretty big mess when you're carrying out one of these tests and there's no reason to get antifreeze 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 antifreeze all over the floor. Right. So they'll actually prep the car to get it ready. They measure it, they weigh it, and they want it to be as close to like a real life situation as possible. So they'll put different dummies in the car. Sometimes they fill it out with, you know, adult male, 50th percentile male, 5th percentile female in the passenger, another 5th percent female in the back. 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 too. And they have all sorts of high-speed 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 going to see that just wouldn't be translated from the data that the sensors are picking up on the dummies. Yeah. And 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 drop the cinder block on the accelerator and shut the door really fast and jump out of the way? 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 35 miles an hour into that wall, or I guess in the case of the insurance group, I think they go 40, right? Yeah. So they go a little bit faster. And they do different kinds of impacts. They go, you know, I think 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 you think, yeah, that's the worst of the worst. Of course, that's what you should prepare for. But it's pretty cool that what's the name of the insurance group? The IHS, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.

Yeah, they started saying, and a lot of stuff was overhauled in 2010, 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 headlight. And there's like just a bit of overlap. And it's not a head on collision. Like we're building these for 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, not layovers, what do they call them? Overlaps. Instead of a full head on collision, they're learning that some of those crashes can be worse. And so we need to start testing that stuff. And 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 if you're doing a head on collision, it's so rare that two cars run completely like hood ornament to hood ornament. This is not how it happens. It's usually like the front bumper of one car into the other. And the car, the auto industry car makers have been creating these crumple zones in the front that were relying on 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 IHS started 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 stop sitting on their laurels and like rechallenge everybody again. Yeah, I think they found that a lot of those sort of diagonal hits were causing a lot of like pretty catastrophic leg injuries, right? Yeah. And so they had to kind of reconfigure things inside the car. And, you know, modern cars 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, you know, Volvo's are known for their safety anyway. And these things, I mean, they have all sort of 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, in this car, your seatbelt, it's called pretension. They have pretensioners in the seatbelt that will tighten down on you right before an impact. And I've had that thing tighten 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 seatbelt

cranks down on you. They also have something called a force limiter that is going to work in hand in hand with that pretensioner to make sure that they, you know, it doesn't just pretension through your chest into the backseat. And so that all happens just before the airbag. It's all timed out like by the millisecond. Yeah. To tighten down that seatbelt to try and keep you from going forward at all. And then the airbag 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 that you're slowing that kinetic energy down as slowly and evenly as you can. They work hand and de-gloved hand. Hand and de-gross. And yeah, you could, you like seatbelts

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 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 engaged, you just kind of pop a little lever and push it into place. The side curtain airbags raise. So, because they know that the airbag will hit the child 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, in side impact airbags, there was another development 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 came about because of the crash testers suddenly doing like T-bone testing, like side impact tests. But now they've also realized that if you hit like the front corner of your car, like say on a telephone pole, it's going to spin you around. You're going to start rotating around the telephone pole and you might slide off of that front airbag coming out of your steering wheel. So, 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 these side impact curtains come down when there's this front bumper impact too,

like on a telephone pole, because people are going to slide off and you want the side impact airbag 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 people say, yeah, actually, that's not a bad idea. You put them everywhere. Yeah. Who was that? Was it Dennis Leary? What? That was a stand-up comedian who's like, they should just all be side, they should all just be. Oh, really? I think so. Well, that just shows how easy it can be to steal a bit. Yeah, accidentally, right? Yeah. You owe Dennis Leary $5. All right, I'll pay him

right after this ad break. Okay. Well, now when you're on the road driving in your truck, why not learn a thing or two from Josh and Chuck? It's stuff you should know. All right. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man.

And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that Michael and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular. And to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life in India. It's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're

going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, Major League Baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the I Heart Radio app,

Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, so we never really said what happens in the crash test. 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. A lot of people look to the IIHS as maybe being the gold standard and the safety administration is being more government bureaucracy, but they're both doing pretty good work. 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 one and there's a full impact where they drag the car at 35 miles an hour into a concrete barrier and the whole hood, the whole front bumper is involved in the impact. The IIHS, and this is one reason why they're kind of looked at as maybe being a little better, they do parts where the front bumper, only a percentage is used. And they do two different crash tests. They do one where 25% of the front bumper, so it'd be like left headlight to left headlight kind of crash, head on collision. Then they do another one that's 40%. That involves more of the bumper. They also do those pole tests. 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 people do run into a pole, a telephone pole once in a while, and these groups are trying to recreate real-world scenarios as much as possible to see how cars hold up. Yeah, and again, to reiterate, the IIHS does an extra five miles per hour, 40 as opposed to 35. There is an injury classification system 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 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. They were kind enough to basically create a handbook that they shared with these car testers and car makers so that they could take this data and translate it into injuries. They could say, oh, well, the crash test dummy had a load of five million newtons on what would be the femur, and so the femur would have just snapped in eight pieces, so that would be this number. That abbreviated injuries report 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 IIHS looks at how the car holds up in crashes as far as injuries goes, and then also the other occupant safety stuff too, like the seatbelts, the airbags, all of that stuff. Right, and you mentioned in 2010 is when things, and it's kind of horrifying to think of, they were doing good work up until 2010, it's not like it was willy-nilly or anything, but when you look at all the changes they've made since 2010, 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. So they changed things in 2010, the new star ratings came out in 2011, and cars that were previously getting four and five star ratings in every category in 2010 all of a sudden weren't 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, they're using the different size dummies, they're now using that again, that small adult female instead of the 510-170 male who, if I ever weigh literally 100, because I'm about 510, if I ever weigh 170 on the nose, I don't know. That's super extraordinary.

I'm either going to try and gain five or lose five, I don't want to be 170 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. Now we're close to it. Right, you're just playing it safe. Yeah, yeah, but if I go on some massive weight loss campaign, I'm going to stop at like 180, and be like, I like a little chunk around the middle. That's what I'm going for, is 180 as well maybe.

Yeah, that's a good weight, but you're like six feet though, right? I am five foot 11 and a half, it just irks me to no end. And getting smaller. Yeah, just like the average male. Yep, you'll be 510 one day my friend. You think so? No, probably not that short. Okay.

But I used to be a solid 510 and now I'm like five, nine and a half. What happens? What, are you just getting compressed? I don't know, I think that's a good, 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.

Some of the other key parts of the post 2010 is 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 putting in these additional measures for neck extension, chest deflection, and femur. And I think they didn't have that before, which is kind of horrifying. What else? I think they added the pole test. Yeah, running into poles, it's a big one too.

One of the things that they did that really changed things is that rather than just getting an absolute score based on their criteria, they started pitting cars against one another too. Oh yeah, that's a huge one. That was an enormous change because now they're like, okay, you want to be the best? Well, you got to be the best in the industry. You can't just be like, yes, we're all going to meet this. And that was one reason why those 2010 changes were made and one reason why the IIHS keeps changing its tests, they're not like, well, like anytime they create a new test or they create a new standard,

all of the automakers rush to meet that. 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 over designing. They will sometimes meet minimum requirements even when they're exceeding minimum requirements. And this is a good example of that because the NHTSA, 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 NHTSA and you're fine. Like it just looks bad to your consumer, but the fact that it looks bad to your consumer means that the automaker will scramble to try to get that five star rating. But then 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 side or the passenger side of the bumper.

We just have to worry about the whole front because that's what the NHTSA does when they're doing tests. And if we can meet that standard, we'll get that five stars. Well, when the NHTSA and the IIHS 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 superfluous. None of this is mandated. It's not mandatory. No car maker has to submit to this. 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 illegal about that. But 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 airbags and such and safety standards and you wear your seatbelt, 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 going to fare pretty well these days, thanks to the work that all these people have done over the years. Even there are outliers, but they have made cars really, really incredibly safe to get into what I would just describe as sort of a normal car wreck and not a fender bender,

like, you know, a car wreck 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, they're, you know, the account of what happened and you're just like, man, there it is right there. Like those people 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. One way they really need to ramp it up and I couldn't tell if they were actually even

doing this testing yet, but some of that stuff you sent pointed out says that like, they're 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. 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, which often happens in these cases of a big SUV or a big truck compared to a smaller car, 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 this stuff? Right, exactly. I don't know if they are yet either, but they seem to be on the precipice, if not. Another one, another criticism I've seen of both groups is that they're testing these

at 35 miles an hour, 40 miles an hour. And everybody's like, well, I drive a heck of a lot faster than 40 miles an hour. What would my car do at 60, you know, or 70 or 80, something like that. And that is a big criticism. The both agencies push back and say, this is where most of the accidents happen. I'm sure they're basing that on statistics and I would probably tend to say, okay, yes. But what about the, you know, maybe that's 51%, but what about the 49% that is, you know, much faster than that?

And I think if they did start crash testing at higher speeds, cars would be shown to be kind of pitiful 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 60 through the neighborhood? You know, they're saying like this, this is assuming people are driving the speed limit, which is not the case.

And we, I have a street very near my house that is, 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 60, 70 miles an hour. It's just ridiculous. I know, dude. I've gotten to this like point where I've turned into an old middle-aged man where I will scream too fast in your neighborhood.

Low down. How do you do? I had somebody driving too fast and it is very, like I can't help it. I can't not do it. Yeah. And I live 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 light is green, they will just hammer it to try and make that light.

And like all of a sudden they're going like, literally like 50 miles an hour in front of my house. And I just, oh man, it makes me so mad. Yeah. I'm with you. It's so angry about that stuff. Just no point because, well, it's because it's, you know, you know the deal. Sure.

I know. People driving that fast to save what ends up being 30 seconds at a 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 unnerving that people take that kind of risk just to make a light. 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 pee? No. You've made your bed now, you have to stand in it. Pee in it.

You got anything else? I got nothing else. I got one more thing. One of the reasons why I also love the IIHS is the highest possible rating you could get from them is just good. Yeah. I know. Poor, marginal, acceptable, and then good.

How do we do? Good. Nothing, nothing better? No exclamation points? No confetti? No. Good. Good.

Well, since Chuck and I both said good, that means of course everybody's time for a listener mail. This is from our trepanation episode, which just dropped today in real time. Oh, yeah. Hey guys, I was listening to the episode on tree panning, and I feel like I'm such adult. I literally had never thought of craniotomies as the modern version of tree panning, trepanning. What did we end up with? Tree panning?

I don't know. Tree panning doesn't sound familiar. Tree 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 Chiari, I think it's C-H-I-A-R-I, and I bet you it's not Chiari. You got to say it like an Italian person. Chiari, malformation syndrome, and part of decompression surgery was a craniotomy.

This totally computes with the idea of ancient people using tree panning to relieve chronic headaches since one of Chiari'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 the 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 case myself.

Just wanted to stop falling over. But you mentioned in the episode that there were a lot of internet rumors that tree panning can help with depression, so now I know why he said that. Anyway, this is a fun episode to 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 falling 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 stuffpodcast. iHeartRadio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts on iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever

you listen to your favorite shows. About my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye-bye-bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Munga Shatikler, and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe. You can find it in Major League Baseball, international banks, K-pop groups, even the White House.

But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.