Quote:
Originally Posted by Meatballs
Well, please enlighten me about the facts, Kaisen.
I've worked 13 years at Volvo in the safety department but quit recreantly. All that safety work seamed very real to me. Not like a hype at all, but I guess I was wrong?
I've worked a lot with Ford during the development of the EUCD platform and done much of the crash testing and analysis. And yes the Mondeo and the V70 shares the same platform but the safety structure is not exactly the same. Also the airbags, belts, belt pretensioners, seats, dash etc are not the same.
Lets discuss the "hype" regarding high strength steels. Why do car manufactures use them? To make cars stronger?
No, high strength steels are used because you can use thinner sheet metal and therefore save weight. I trust that you know all about HAZ around spot welds and how that makes the safety cage unstable when using high strength steels? I also trust you know all about how that affects real accidents?
Call me sheeple all you want if that makes you happy. You seem to have all the answers.
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Yes, Volvo is the only company that employs engineers in the "Safety Department"
Ford and Hyundai just copy Volvo's innovation, right?
Sure, high strength steels aren't utilized simply for safety. The benefit can be torsional rigidity as it pertains to handling, for example. But one of the main benefits is controlling energy dissipation through the bodystructure in an impact. Different materials deform at varying rates. By utilizing these varying materials in varying shapes and thicknesses engineers can use computational dynamics to determine how to best transfer that energy away from the occupants....while maintaining weight goals, cost goals, chassis NVH, handling, etc. Correct? Or was Volvo using some other Nordic wizardry?
The newest platforms are, generally speaking, better than the previous generations. Materials, computing/analysis power, new manufacturing techniques, etc are getting better all the time.
The "hype" is that Volvo somehow has better safety than other manufacturers. And that's simply not true. And note that I didn't say that there were manufacturers that were better than Volvo. The proof is in the pudding, as they say. Several manufacturers are earning similar ratings, both general (i.e. 5-stars) or specific (i.e. femur loads) in similar classes/weights of cars.
Volvo has marketed safety for so long that consumers believe Volvo = safety. I'm simply stating that there are other safe cars.
In fact, the 2008 Ford Mondeo and 2008 Volvo V70 performed almost identically in Euro NCAP crash testing. The Ford earned an adult score of 35 (15.3 front / 15.8 side) and the Volvo earned an adult score of 34 (15.2 front / 15.9 side), both good enough to earn NCAP perfect five stars.
But the Volvo's safer, right?
And you'd still rather have a 2008 Volvo with the old EUCD platform than a 2013 Ford with the brand-new CD4 platform, right?