Toymods Car Club Inc: General Car Talk => popup headlights no longer allowed?

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shaneblack
Occasional Poster

Location:
Albion Park, NSW
Registered:
October 2004

Re: popup headlights no longer allowed?

Tue, 16 November 2004 07:39

fractoid wrote on Mon, 15 November 2004 14:53

Umm... if you get hit more than a very glancing blow at 60km/h, you are DEAD. If you fall off a 14 meter high cliff, you'll be doing 60km/h at the bottom. If I'd just fallen 14 meters I don't think I'd particularly care whether I was landing on a smooth bonnet, a bullbar or a popup headlight. I'd be too busy dying from internal injuries and massive trauma.

Well, I agree that this law is a pretty poor attempt at reducing pedestrian injuries, that there are many more higher risk items that should be addressed well before popup and that if a pedestrian is being hit then someone has stuffed up already and that's what should really be fixed. However I would have to disagree with the equation being as simple as being hit at 60 means your dead.

Taking the cliff analogy, if you fall 14 meters onto rocks then yes, you're stuffed. But if you where falling into water then the issue becomes how you hit. If you hit it flat then you're still stuffed, on the other hand if you actually do a proper dive you walk away.

It's not about how fast you are going but how quickly you slow down. Back to the case of being hit by a car, it's how quickly you are brought up to the speed of the car.

If you hit a large flat frontal area, like a bus or 4WD then it's just like hitting the water flat, you're stuffed. On the other hand you hit a bonnet and assuming worst case and the car doesn't actually slow down you'll roll up over the whole car. Not only is the time to be brought up to speed increased significantly but you also never actually reach 60 km/h so the impact on your body is far less. The closest case I have to experiencing this is coming off a bicycle at a speed somewhere between 60 and 70 km/h. I hit the road which has to be less forgiving than sheet metal and glass yet was able to carry the bike (which was totaled) home suffering bruising, grazing and carpet burn from my clothes. So the human body can definitely survive an impact from that speed receiving only recoverable injuries.

However, add something flat in the way over the car to stop one part of the body suddenly and that part is broken. So instead of receiving recoverable injuries someone just got a broken back.

However, as I said before I think that popups would only be a small risk item in terms of numbers of incidents. Probably in a similar figure to say hood ornaments like a Jag or Rolls Royce have. I would think even the addition of roo or bullbars to a 4WD would cause little more injuries than the already large flat area of the 4WD would be doing. The other big issue with 4WDs, etc is the height. Chances are you're going to be hit above your center of gravity and go under the vehicle and being run over is always going to be bad.

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