Carl F. Thelin

HUMAN TORPEDO (and similar stories)

You may become a human torpedo. All car makers warn you not to recline the seat back all the way while riding in a moving car or van. Adjusting the seat a bit for comfort is OK. If you lay all the way back down, you will squirt under the lap belt during a head-on collision and slam knees-first into the instrument panel. The lap belt will dig up under your rib cage causing so internal injuries and really nasty bruises. The shoulder belt will not do much good when you are flat under it.

If another car hits your car hard on the rear, you will torpedo out from the lap belt going toward the back. Because the seatback is never truly horizontal, you will actually rocket up the slight incline remaining in the seatback. If the crash impact is severe, you could fly so far back that your head hits the back window. A skull fracture or a broken neck is likely.

So – sit up, as your mother told you!

            LOCK THE DOORS – ALWAYS

Locking the doors on your car or truck does more than keep the bad guys out. If your car is hit by another vehicle on the side, think of how awful it can be if the door opens. You are about four times more likely to suffer serious or fatal injury when fully ejected. You could also fly out before the vehicle overturns and crushes you.

Using the lap and shoulder belt will keep you from going all the way out of the car but you might be badly injured anyway. I have seen events where the occupant had an arm or a leg crushed or severed. In a few ugly incidents, the overturned car body crushed the person’s head.

 Locking the door disconnects the door latch mechanism located at the rear edge of the door from the inside and outside door handles. Even if an impact from the side caves in the door and bends the rod connecting the inside handle to the latch, it will not cause the door to open. The door latch is cannot be released even if something outside catches on and pulls open the outside door handle. Many cars and vans have doors that lock automatically whenever you are underway. Carmakers do this now to avoid those lawsuits where people were thrown out in a crash.

Doors -- and windows, and seat belts all work together. Ideally, the occupants get protection with all three. Seat belts normally will prevent full ejection if the vehicle overturns.  Despite what you see in movies, full ejection away from the vehicle is not a safe thing. Usually the ejected person lands hard and breaks body parts, or is crushed by the vehicle. If the door remains closed but the window is "down" or broken out, the seat belt will allow a person's extended arm and head to be crushed by the edge of the roof if the car rolls onto that side -- and that does happen. You could still bang your head on the roof rail above the side window even when the door and the window stay in place. Nothing guarantees total safety in a collision.

Other people insist it would be easier to escape from a burning car when the door is not locked. Which is best? There is no single answer to this question. The occupants must be conscious and physically able to extract themselves after the crash that causes the fire. You can’t be sure that a crash that causes a car fire will leave you physically able to get out.

The doors should not be physically jammed by the collision deformation. In our crash testing, we check the car’s doors to see that does not happen. The government and the industry design doors to make sure they will not unlock because of crash shock forces.

If one or more windows are open or broken out, one could escape that way, again, if physically capable. The tempered glass in the side and read windows is hard to break without a hard rock. It falls away in salt-like granules after being broken.

Even if the doors are locked, the inside handle may release the latch. Some car makers have that arrangement, others do not. The rear doors are always equipped with child-protection systems. There is a mechanical lever located on the rear edge of the door. It can be used by parents to render the inside door handle inoperable.

Another arrangement gaining popularity is “OnStar”. I used that word to denote similar systems sold by other car companies. It uses the Global Positioning System (GPS) which gathers data from three or more space satellites to determine your precise geographical location. Onstar is an arrangement of a GPS, a cellular telephone and the required electric door locks. When a vehicle overturns or is in a crash severe enough to deploy the air bags occurs, Onstar goes into action. The system wirelessly calls a system operator who attempts do talk with occupants. He can alert the police, fire and EMT teams if needed, even if you can not reply. He can also remotely unlock the doors. Some airbag systems can cause the doors to unlock after a crash without the Onstar system.