A Good Day to Come to Work
By Bob Lange
Executive Director, Vehicle Structure and Safety Integration
I woke up about 4:15 this morning, which is rare because I usually sleep really well and the alarm usually is set for 5 a.m. But I was pretty excited about coming to work today because it is opening day for our new Rollover Crash Facility. This is really huge for several reasons, but the biggest ones are making our vehicles safer and learning more about what causes injuries in rollover crash.
We started thinking about building this facility four years ago, and two years ago we made the $10 million commitment to build it. We’ve been learning about frontal crashes for the last 45 years, but significant investigation into rollovers really only began in the late 1970s and early 1980s, so we’re clearly not at the same learning stage with rollovers.
We have learned enough to classify types of rollover crashes, and our knowledge about dummy motion is reliable to the first time a vehicle hits the ground in a rollover. But we also know that dummy motion after the first hit is unrepeatable. We’ve learned that our crash sensing for rollovers must be much more predictive than for other types of crashes.
There is a lot of public attention to what is known as roof crush in a rollover, but our research shows is that injury most often occurs in a rollover when the head stops suddenly and the body keeps going. We see this in unrestrained dummies even without a vehicle hitting the ground. We have advanced the scientific knowledge of this even from where we were two years ago.
GM is the first auto company to build a facility to integrate rollover crash testing with the other crash tests and we do. It means we don’t have to wait in line with other automakers at the one supplier that has a rollover facility in North America.
It’s unusual in a testing environment to invite the news media to come out and watch something that hasn’t been perfected. And the corkscrew rollover test we did today was only the fourth one we’ve done in our new building. We were confident about what would happen to the Buick Rainier that we sent off a ramp at 44 miles an hour. We knew about where it would land based on a couple of live tests we did last week.
But the real value isn’t just getting some positive attention for safety work. It is the work itself that will help us make our vehicles safer for the people who buy them.
To see more from the facility, make sure to check out Flickr.
- Posted in Cars & Trucks
motorman
GM must have ALL their new car models get a 5 star crash rating if you want to break into the Consumer Reports crowd
Robert Wilson
Makes me even more comfortable knowing that my wife and son will be riding around a GM built Buick Rainier.
edvard
This is an excellent idea. Safety testing concepts like these led to some great innovations in automotive safety, like Volvo’s adaptation of the 3 point seat belt. Who knows what can be learned from studying the impacts of a rollover?Perhaps better/newer safety devices.
Fred S
Great investment. Safety should always be first and foremost when designing vehicles.
Two suggestions: One how about investing in wiper blade research. Here in the northern climates when the blades get cold they tend to leave that wide streak right in the drivers vision line. Blade replacement does not always solve the problem. You may even find that on some models it’s the shape of the windshield that’s the problem and not the blades.
Second, just for fun, how about an on-line contest to name the new crash test dummies?
Here’s on for starters — Flip Wheelson