Oh, my God. I completely agree with you and I hate to see any type of vintage tin, regardless of manufacture, wasted so friviously for such useless knowledge. That's just wrong.

As a crash investigator, (I'm not a reconstuctionist, but I'm working on it), it is kind of interesting to see the scope and type of the damage that the vehicles sustain in the crash... but they could easily done this comparison and achieved the same results by doing a head-on into a fixed object with the same structural integrity as the Chevy with the little car.

As a guy who drives old cars around regularly, it scares the crap out of me to think what would happen to me if some dink driving a newer car plowed into me.

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1979 Plymouth Fire Arrow
2005 Scion xB Super Toaster

Questions, comments, observations:

Was the Bel Air in like new condition as if it were less than a year old? Was there 50 years of stress cracks on the spot welds holding the body together? How many hundred thousand miles on the odometer? Were the body panels full of rust with a fresh coat of bondo and paint over the top to make it look nice? Had the car been taken apart and poorly plug welded back together?

How carefully was the choice of collision type, and how would the modern car fare in a centered head on collision, when that big V8 engine came through the front and ended up squarely in the center of the Malibu front seats.

Who says crumple zones are a new development, look at that crumple zone!

Big, heavy American cars are supposed to be so safe...

5.8 million crashes annually, but attrition of crashes and wear and tear have had such a negligible affect on thinning the number of old cars that pollute the most... The mantra of the environmental extremists who want to divert attention away from their new SUVs and onto those other people, over there, far away from upscale suburban neighborhoods, those dirty people who drive those dirty cars...

But wait, if we create new technologies to prevent crashes, thereby keeping cars on the road longer, 50 years from now, when cars are powered by water, or hydrogen, or happy thoughts and fairy dust, there will be an even greater number of 2009 vintage automobiles left on the road. And by that time, those 2009 vintage cars will be the greatest polluters...

Seems counterproductive from a societal engineering standpoint. Perhaps they should be making cars more dangerous, in order to get them destroyed more quickly, and increase fatalities, in order to thin out the population, and decrease the numbers of those evil people who drive.

[/quote]Questions, comments, observations:

Was the Bel Air in like new condition as if it were less than a year old? Was there 50 years of stress cracks on the spot welds holding the body together? How many hundred thousand miles on the odometer? Were the body panels full of rust with a fresh coat of bondo and paint over the top to make it look nice? Had the car been taken apart and poorly plug welded back together?

How carefully was the choice of collision type, and how would the modern car fare in a centered head on collision, when that big V8 engine came through the front and ended up squarely in the center of the Malibu front seats.

Who says crumple zones are a new development, look at that crumple zone!

Big, heavy American cars are supposed to be so safe...

5.8 million crashes annually, but attrition of crashes and wear and tear have had such a negligible affect on thinning the number of old cars that pollute the most... The mantra of the environmental extremists who want to divert attention away from their new SUVs and onto those other people, over there, far away from upscale suburban neighborhoods, those dirty people who drive those dirty cars...

But wait, if we create new technologies to prevent crashes, thereby keeping cars on the road longer, 50 years from now, when cars are powered by water, or hydrogen, or happy thoughts and fairy dust, there will be an even greater number of 2009 vintage automobiles left on the road. And by that time, those 2009 vintage cars will be the greatest polluters...

Seems counterproductive from a societal engineering standpoint. Perhaps they should be making cars more dangerous, in order to get them destroyed more quickly, and increase fatalities, in order to thin out the population, and decrease the numbers of those evil people who drive.[/quote]


Right on. :D Excellent. Well put.

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1979 Plymouth Fire Arrow
2005 Scion xB Super Toaster

Yep. It is a damn shame what they did to that old Chevy. Cool old car - and it didn't look to be in too bad of shape. What a frickin' waste.

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1979 Plymouth Fire Arrow
2005 Scion xB Super Toaster

There is more than one reason to be outraged, and probably more than two.

The societal engineering aspect and all the chicanery involved in propping up an agenda.

And

The waste of a perfectly good resource, a car in good shape.

Smashing a pristine car should rate the same as cutting down a pristine redwood tree. The explanation of "We have more trees" never worked with the hippie chained to the trunk of the tree. But the hippies can crash cars into each other, and the explanation of "We have more cars" is good enough.

if you watch the video carefully, you can see this big puff of what looks like rust coming out of ze chevy
EDIT: according to newtons 1st law of motion, the old chevy should have DESTROYED the newer one. more mass=a greater push from the old chevy. but no, they just stood at a standstill. im fairly certain that detroit iron from the 50's heavier than the shit cars that chevy puts out today. you can bet your ass that that test was rigged

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if it was easy to restore, they would call it chevrolet
dont piss off america, or well bring democracy to your country
"if god had wanted you to live, he would not have created me"

1959 Chevrolet Bel Air - 3,622 pounds

2006 Chevrolet Malibu - 3,175 pounds

www.carfolio.com

3622 pounds of steel and chrome.....

3175 pounds of plastic and airbags.....

I will take the chrome please

As for the story.... damn shame to waste the old chevy for a "No s*#t sherlock" sort of point.
As far as the rest of the story, do we realy need cars that avoid accidents? How about better driver training, tougher licensing rules etc... Most of the accidents are caused by people who should not be driving anyway.

And I agree....lets keep life dangerous...thin out the herd a little

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Brad D.

'83 Sapporo Technica; '84 Starion ES; '87 Conquest TSi;
'91 RX7 convertible; '68 Camaro SS 350 convertible; '71 NSU 1200c

Wow thats pretty crazy.

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- '71 Datsun 240z.....L28ET here we come

Right on.

I wonder how much of it had to do with the X-frame underneath that Impala? I know that they weren't great in side impacts.

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Pity, the '59 is my favorite of the tailfinned Chevys.

5th gear did a similar test: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBDyeWofcLY

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Nice work Chevrolet, I never knew that new cars performed better in crash tests than old ones, this test has now solved this big mystery and cleared it up for me.

Astounding!

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http://www.oldjapanesecar.com

One positive note...it was a four door..which really isn't that rare. And yes, the giant cloud of rust really makes this test suspect...I mean, they used to say "wipe the blood off the dash and re-sell it" for a reason.

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http://edz280zxblog.blogspot.com/
http://www.zazzle.com/edz280zx?rf=238417716376693023

Im not sure what they are trying to prove. I mean cars made in the 50's weren't designed with safety in mind. For example, seat belts in most of them were an option in the high model cars. Ford in the mid fifties tried putting dash pads on their cars and advertised it as safety pads and people hated it. Cars then were made to destroy what they hit, not get destroyed by getting hit. A good comparison to this test is running a civic or celica into a mack truck.

And yeah it was a 4 Door but gees, there was a lot of good parts on that car and you just dont see a 59 Chevrolet every day. All 59's are somewhat rare because they are a one year model car like most cars in the late 50's

While I was in high school, they had the big controversy because some Japanese elected official or automotive executive was quoted as saying "American auto workers are lazy". This was one of the reasons that the Japanese auto sales kept growing (along with a better quality product, better price, and total ineptitude of American automotive design and building). The entire country went into a reactionary backlash against everything Japanese, that ranked right up with book burning. The teacher's pet group at my high school organized a fund raiser, following a nation wide fad, pay a dollar per swing with a sledge hammer on a Japanese car (fresh from the salvage yard). I passed, I had no interest in fund raisers or school spirit. And I thought it was totally stupid, because the Japanese were pumping out thousands of cars per day. To paraphrase the Taco Bell commercial of the time "Crush all you want, they'll make more".

But they aren't making 1959 model cars any more. Bel Airs or anything else. These cars are part of our cultural history and are artwork under the subset of consumer products and product design. To relate this in the language of the PBS/Antiques Roadshow crowd, they are just as important and relevant as Tiffany lamps and Art Deco toasters.

This relates to the Cash for Clunkers program and all the efforts to destroy older cars. It doesn't matter what it is, they don't make them any more, and once they are gone, there won't be any more of them. And this is why we should all be lending support to prevent things like this from happening to fans of cars outside our own personal preference, and people in those other groups should be lending support to prevent these things from happening to us.

There are people who don't like cars of any kind or type, don't like people who like cars, and their agenda is to get rid of us. If we let them pick us off one group at a time, there won't be anyone left to defend us when they come for our hobby.

JT191 for president 2012!!!

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Brad D.

'83 Sapporo Technica; '84 Starion ES; '87 Conquest TSi;
'91 RX7 convertible; '68 Camaro SS 350 convertible; '71 NSU 1200c

Yeah I have to agree with that.

My point would be that if a car from 1959 is still around now, particularly if it isn't something that special, some effort needs to be made to keep it around for people to enjoy. If I saw a Bel Air of any description whilst on my rounds, it'd brighten up my day, bet it'd be great fun to own too. I like 4-doors best anyway.

Bit like the cars in my signature, I'm never going to win Pebble Beach Concours in any of them, to most people they're just unspectacular/ordinary old cars, but every so often I'll get some encouragement from someone who hasn't seen one for absolutely years and get a bit misty-eyed because they bought one in 1988 or something. Got to keep them around as otherwise there won't be any and where would be the fun in that? It's all history, memories, etc.

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http://www.oldjapanesecar.com