🚀 go-pugleaf

Walt Horning wrote:
> 
> One recent radio news item was pointing out how the conservationists
> were continuing to push for lighter weight trucks for better fuel
> economy. But one of the ways to make trucks lighter (like pickup
> trucks, was to put less metal in the body and frame. But doing this
> resulted in more deaths of light truck passengers. Conversely, by
> making the trucks heavier, more passenger car passengers died,
> especially in cars made lighter to also save fuel.
> 
> So no matter how one strengthens or lightens vehicles, the bottom line
> is that to save fuel more lives must be lost, but to save lives, more
> fuel must be burned.
> 
> Kind of puts the conservationists in direct oppostion with the safety
> freaks.

Yes, especially if both groups are full of luddites who fail to consider 
more technologically advanced ways of improving crash protection,
without making their vehicles into essentually battering rams for other
vehicles (together, of course with the type of driving that leads to
this- if a vehicle never crashes, it is not used as a batering ram).

True this costs money; usually we do hear about more exotic materials,
though I wonder how much of this would be to the R&D, and how much to
the unwillingness to produce new technologies, the costs of which could
be spread out in mass production.  Were not today's bike helmetws, for
instance, once considered exotic and expensive.  Indeed, was not
aluminum once a "precious" metal because of the expense of its
production a century or more ago?

Douglas A. Willinger
Takoma Park Highway Design Studio