Informed For Life
March 11th, 2006There’s an old saying about the danger of half knowledge, so I’m always looking for the flipside to a claim, the engineering compromise. When I see a car advertised as having “5star safety” I immediately check how it does in offset collision and side impact tests done by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety then cross reference real-world death rates, while taking into account vehicle weight, handling/braking and rollover propensity as well. It’s inexact, but far more useful than blindly following one test, especially as a car that does well in one test (and is advertised as such) often does poorly in the rest. (Full frontal collisions favor cars with long snouts, offset and side impact tests are a better test of structural soundness).
On the tour for his latest book, Blink, Malcolm Gladwell pointed out that humans don’t have the ability to weight information. You can write a formula or computer program to place more significance on one thing than another but when you make decsions on a day-to-day basis the mind functions more like a ball on a roulette wheel – you hop around from factor to factor until you get tired of the process, lose momentum and settle on whatever’s easiest. (I see this a lot when helping people – they tend to buy whatever’s in front of them the moment they get fed up of car shopping, not what they want the most).
Now retired mechanical engineer Michael Dulberger has weighted the crash data according to its statistical significance (43% of deaths occur in front impacts, 26 in side imacts, etc.) and shared the results here.
(Thanks him for that, and to Motor Trend’s Frank Markus for the lead…)