BIG MONEY
Big money will solve problems for Uncle Sam. NHTSA wanted us to be able to do really big crashes, such as car-to-car, or buy crashing heavy trucks. Our team designed and built an all-new towing system. We named it TANTOS – the Tandem Towing System. At first we thought we could take the engine out of the Road Runner and put it in tandem with another engine – nose to tail, as GM did with Oldsmobile engines for oil well pumps.

 That was not enough. CAL built a building behind the barrier and installed three Hemi engines there. Two were in tandem, with the tail of the first one tied to the front of the second engine. The second engine had an automatic transmission locked in high gear. The original Plymouth engine was parallel to the other two, with the original fully functional automatic transmission. They all fed their torque into a custom made gear box that put all that power out into a big auxiliary truck manual transmission, then that torque went into the original modified axle from under the Plymouth. After several iterations for growth and change, we had a 1500 horsepower towing system. It was fully computer controlled and able to pull even a loaded semi trailer down our 530 foot-long guide track into a 60 mph crash into the concrete barrier. By routing the tow cable around several flat pulleys, we could also pull two vehicles into car-to-car crashes.

Some of these demonstration very high speed crashes were spectacular. The routine, almost every day testing of ordinary cars for compliance was not. NHTSA has us do compliance tests of cars without dummies. At that time the NHTSA was looking to see that the steering wheel did not come back too far into the car. We looked to see that the windshield did not come loose or fly out. From the pit, the cameras would tell if the fuel system leaked simulated gasoline during and after a 30 mph crash.

Now we had a system that worked at the push of a button. Everything was remotely controlled. We even had the abort system to save us from crashing cars at the wrong speed. The 30 mph tests became routinely boring. Now we had the power and reliability to do good research work at CAL.

RESEARCH CRASHING

A sister department at CAL was getting NHTSA program work to conduct research looking for better safety systems. The research crash tests were to examine what would improve crashworthiness of the vehicle – the structural integrity during a crash. Other tests were to measure improvements of occupant restraints – seatbelt systems, and airbags. That stuff was very interesting and everyone learned a lot. Initially, I looked upon the government program of testing airbags as a typical boondoggle. It did not take long, while running these tests, to realize that the air bags did work, they were reliable, and they worked especially well if the dummy was also using the seat belts. It is really too bad that the NHTSA wrote the FMVSS 208 safety standard to say that airbags had to provide their protection in tests conducted without seat belts in use. Years later, they had to reverse that requirement.

I WAS A SAAB FWD NUT

Everyone knew me as the former GM engineer who did front wheel drive cars. I was also a big fan of other FWD cars, such as the Saab and the Audi. An interesting opportunity showed up when the Saab auto company wanted to get a head start on safety bumpers, to win favor with our government and the insurance industry. The so-called safety bumper standard, now known as Part 581, was under development. Saab brought several of the Saab 900 model cars with black rubber-covered energy-absorbing bumpers. We ran them into our flat crash barrier at 2 ½ mph and at 5 mph – forward and backward. We never thought to design the CAL computer controlled speed system operate that slowly.

I did not yet have my nick-name CRASHER-CARL. The way I drove on the test track, I was FEARLESS FOSTER (my real middle name is Foster). How could I not volunteer to drive the Saabs into the wall? Here is how we did it. Instead of using the three-engine towing system, we ran the towing cable through the hole in the barrier, around the man-hole sized pulley, and tied it to the back of a car, just as we did before TANTOS. We used a fifth wheel to measure speed very accurately and sent the electric signal to be displayed on a large voltmeter biased so the needle pointed to Zero at 5 mph. If the car was going slower, the speed registered as less than zero. The gage was taped on the hood of the tow car.

The Saab could not be equipped with the usual flanged wheels welded to the lower frame for guidance by the rail. Saab could not allow anything to interfere with the structure of the car. I had to sit in the car and do the steering. I did not have to worry about holding a 5 mph speed – the tow-car driver did that. The towing cable-clamp would release when it hit the trigger one foot before impact. All I had to do was steer my car. I discovered it was hard not to apply the brakes as the wall loomed closer and closer, but I did the job.
But wait – there’s more. We also had to test the bumper at the rear end. Ok. We put a small piece of tape on the center of the rear view mirror and another on the center of the back window. It took a little practice to learn how to move the steering wheel to keep those marks aligned with the target on the barrier. It worked. The bumpers looked unharmed and there was no damage to the body of the Saab. Our sponsor loved the movies, and won praise for the first commercial 5-mph bumpers. Bumpers like that appeared on many cars later.

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