Car safety

[forgotten_aria]

Most of the car sites I'm looking at seem to feel that safty is the number of airbags and crumple zones, but I'd like to know what accident pervention ratings are. Does anyone know a site that talks about that, things like blind spots, how it handles in twitch steering situations?

Right now I'm most concerned about blindspots. I found one page that was a study back in 2005. I'd like to find the modern equivelent of that.

Comments

[nathanjw]

Not exactly statistics, but an article on the general subject of what constitutes "safety", with a cite to an overall table of deaths by model: Big and Bad.

Blind spots

[ringrose.livejournal.com]

I find that blind spots are partially a matter of how you sit in the car, too. In a car where the back seat has headrests, a short person might have a worse rear view than a tall person. Not out the rear view mirror (because that's a fixed height) but when looking over your shoulder as you should do backing up.

Or, in a car with a curved roof, a tall person might see worse because of the roof curving down, while a short person just sees out the window.

A car might have a large pillar - but will that pillar be in the way? How far back your seat is changes which part of the surroundings it obscures; its blind area might correspond to the parts your side mirrors show, or not.

I have not found a good substitute for driving in a car and paying attention as someone passes you, or having someone walk around the car while you're set to drive. And definately, try backing up.

[jadia.livejournal.com]

In studying blindspots for cars I...

* Had someone move around the car as i looked through my mirrors to see if I could see him

* Drove on a highway and shifted lanes

* Drove in the city and tried to turn right or left where there were pedestrians. Now, this one wasn't intentional, but I just was driving the Prius around and this was when I realized it had front blind spots that were way bigger than I was willing to deal with.

I don't actually know of any resource like what you're looking for though.