February 18, 2003
Got a Problem? ... Let's take five with Moira Gunn. This is "Five Minutes".
I happened to drive past the scene of a terrible car accident recently, which I later learned took the lives of a young father and his daughter. The woman driver of the SUV, in which the Dad and several kids were passengers, changed lanes quickly, seeing an upcoming exit. In doing so, she drove the passenger side of the SUV directly into - and under - the left rear of a huge semi-tractor/trailer.
When I drove by, there was the SUV, standing starkly alone, with essentially nothing left of it above the door handles.
Many times I've driven next to these huge trucks, and I've always grimly noticed that the hood of my car could fit right underneath their trailers. I've always said to myself: Why don't these trailers have some kind of barrier or bumper to prevent just this situation?
And then there are the SUVs. Just counting fatalities, rollovers are clearly their biggest concern. But it doesn't stop there. As the semi was to the SUV, so the SUV is to the standard automobile.
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In the words of Dr. Jeffrey W. Runge, the head of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and a former emergency room physician, "If you are in a passenger car, you would much rather get hit by another passenger car than an SUV or a full-size pickup."
This is known in the industry as a "compatibility problem." It refers to what happens when one make or model of vehicle collides with another. In simplest terms, when two vehicles are incompatible, it means that we know which one of them will suffer far more damage, and this extends to the passengers inside.
It's tempting to say that bigger, heavier vehicles are simply more dangerous than smaller, lighter ones, but SUVs and pickups are also higher than passenger cars. In collisions, they have a tendency skip over the hoods of cars, which means the next stop is the passenger compartment.
This is exactly where engineering can help. But engineers can only solve the problems put before them.
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Recently, the automotive industry, through its lobbying organization, notified Dr. Runge that it is taking steps to improve car safety, as well as the dangerous tendencies of SUVs and pickups. To be clear, the government has been threatening to impose standards in this area, so this could be interpreted as a pre-emptive move. Still, it's a beginning.
There are millions of cars and trucks out on the roads. At any speed, the very fact that they are moving at all makes them dangerous. The automotive industry needs to understand how every vehicle it builds interacts with every other vehicle already on our roads, and it needs to do this as part of the design process, right from the beginning. In case you missed it, the operative word here is "every."
Engineers know that when they design any technology, they need all the parameters of all the challenges they are trying to solve. Otherwise, the technology will fail.
From my standpoint, the problem as described isn't big enough. It doesn't include "every" vehicle on the road.
That's the catch with all technology: Only problems get solved. And it's not a problem unless we say it's a problem.
I'm Moira Gunn. This is Five Minutes.
