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Comment by bencoder | Hacker News Reader

The most interesting part of this for me is that there is a difference at all. The difference is not explained in the article.

I've never lived in the US; what is the difference between EU and US cars in this respect?

Edit for clarity: What I meant, is /why/ is there such a difference in safety? What physical differences between the cars cause that?

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Please read the article again:

"passengers in a typical EU model are 33 per cent safer in front-side collisions, an accident that often results in serious injury, than those in a typical US model."

Less deaths and injuries if cars meet EU standards

I read that, I saw the difference. Sorry I wasn't clear in my original post.

I meant: what causes the difference? Why is there such a big difference?

Quite simply US car manufacturers don't have to make their cars as safe, as a result they include bare minimum safety requirements to pass regulation and save on costs. As another poster says it also seems that they do little R&D in this area either, again probably to save costs and to be able spend money designing more inefficient trucks for single occupants.

That's only part of it, US law requires safty systems to designed around for an adult not using a belt which results in a less safe car when someone wares a belt or is not an adult male.

PS: EU microcar are terrable in high speed crashes, but there not designed for high speed driving either. So it's generally not a real world issue.

Well thats some dumb regulation right there. There is a law that requires people to wear seatbelts and then you make another law that says design safety equipment as if people are ignoring the original law.

This penalises law abiding citizens to protect those who decide to ignore the law and not wear a seatbelt.

Sorry. That's a way harder question :-)

I guess it's all a trade off of material/weight vs performance. If you make a more rigid passenger compartment then it might weigh more and your car might be slower. Or maybe you have to spend more on a stronger type of steel that is more expensive. Or you have to make something more complicated to be safer.

So on average maybe the US cars come down on the lighter/cheaper/faster side of the curve. Obviously the trade offs are incredibly complicated.

The US fleet tends to be heavier on average, surely? More SUVs/light trucks, larger vehicles in general.

Which means that your opposing/counterpart vehicle in the accident is also heavier.

Crash survival depends on the dissipation of kinetic energy into the structures of the vehicle rather than the structures of the human body. Even in well-designed vehicles, more kinetic energy means more danger.

I think you may appreciate my two part answer here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10280323

Essentially at this point there is much less difference than there used to be, I'm not convinced the paper addressed that completely, and the historical progression is detailed.

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