From the article:
> According to safety engineers at the scene, the driver of the 2009 Chevrolet Malibu would likely have suffered slight knee injury. The driver of the 1959 Chevrolet Bel Air would have died instantly.
In earlier years, there used to be 3 neurosurgeons kept on staff. Once seatbelt laws came into effect in the 1970s, that number went down to 1.
Wow, how many lives were saved!
Essentially the car becomes the helmet and does a more complete job on the whole body than just the helmet on the motorcyclist.
I'm surprised the number went down, I'd have thought there would be far more car crash survivors with traumatic brain injuries once people stopped being killed outright so often.
Then they captured a crash between two vehicles at about 35 mph. Today both parties would get out and exchange insurance companies. However this was not the case. Two ambulances hauled away the drivers and the narrator of the film said one did not make it. Indeed we have come a long way in car safety in the past sixty years.
I am genuinely curious where we would be now in regard to automotive safety without government regulation.
People fighting tooth and nails that without helmets they ride safer (what?), they have more situational awareness (more what? we talk about cyclists helmets) and various other arguments that make 0 sense to me, just emotional swings of people rejecting being told what to do by default.
My 2 cents - I didnt wear helmet on bike during youth since nobody did. But when I bought my new xc bike in 2008 I bought a helmet with it. Within a month I had accident due to screwup of my GF back then, where I hit the ground face down hard, losing few seconds of my memory. There was spiky stone in the ground where my forehead hit full force. I would be dead for a long time now if I didnt wear that helmet. No accident before or after, but you only need that 1 moment, same with safety belts.
In any individual incident, a helmet would make things better. However, a helmet is a very bulky thing, most bikes lack a secure storage, and people just don’t want to carry around a big helmet when they go shopping, or to a restaurant, or any other activities. So if you mandate it, biking rates will go down, and cyclists become so uncommon on roads that drivers stop being familiar with how to drive around them, stop looking out for cyclists that are almost never there, etc.
There’a also some evidence that drivers will adjust their behavior based on perceived cyclist protection and skill level; the behavior around a person in a hat and sundress is different than someone in full Lycra with helmet.
But jurisdictions with helmet mandate show no clear reduction in injury rates: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1410838/?tool=p...
In NA, lack of safety regulations is resulting in massively increased ride and hood heights, which is going to kill a lot of people over the coming years.
Wonder how whiplash cases have trended over time. Wouldn't be surprised if they've gone up -- more survivable crashes, haha.
If not, then that makes sense why it would be so prevelant of a thing for the ambulance chasers to use
I had a motion x-ray done of my neck that finally demonstrated that my skull slips slightly side-to-side relative to my atlas (C1 vertebra). So what seemed like my muscles overreacting or just me complaining about psychogenic neck pain (or trying to scam the insurance company) was actually my muscular system making sure I don't suffer an internal decapitation.
If anyone's having trouble with the insurance company insisting nothing is wrong because the static x-rays look fine, I cannot recommend highly enough that you look into a motion x-ray. It's very possible that your spine is only fine when it isn't moving, and that's no way to live your life.
She told the insurance company that the claim was probably fraudulent, and their response was "most whiplash claims are probably fraudulent, but it's cheaper to settle"
I’ve never had it seriously enough that I’ve needed treatment, but I have had a minor kink in my neck that shows up later in the day. The kind of pain where it’s sore when you turn you head one very specific direction.
That stuff is not a joke.
(more lighthearted note: after 3 months, her symptoms were mostly gone except for a new and intermittent nausea. The therapist was confounded for a few days, until he suggested the cause of that might be more related to me than the truck driver)
I had a quick google but the only paper I found that proposed some mechanism ("vertebrobasilar artery insufficiency (VBI) leads to brainstem and cerebellar ischemia and infarction following cervical manipulation", i.e. bashing the neck might mess up blood flow to the brain somehow, causing bits of it to die off) looks complete bullshit.
Also in my last accident, it tooks months for the symptoms to become evident. When an EMT or doctor checks you out after an accident they are checking for life threatening injuries. Not saying "OK, despite the accident you are 100% the same! Go about life as normal!"
I dropped a motorcycle at the track a little over a year ago, and bounced off the tire wall in the process. Had a few bumps and bruises, but felt fine, until my back freaked out a month later. I got it sorted without too much trouble, but whiplash injuries do funny things.
Traffic lights often result in rear-ends (they commonly increase after red light cam installation, though are still safer than the t-bones red light cameras reduce.) Roundabouts, which are more common in Europe, cause these much less, and since you have to slow down to enter one any sort of crashes in one tend to be at slower speeds.
I'm going through wiplash myself right now (mostly gone) and I think that too much drama played a major role. In my case not because of any claims situation, but because having recently gone through an intracranial hemorrhage and because of having spent a year of my early career typing out neurosurgery reports from dictaphone. The result was that I wasn't sufficiently confident that it might be "just whiplash". Went on for months, with hardly any improvement, until a physiotherapist gave me a demonstration of just how capable those muscles are of creating the nastiest headaches. I'm quite convinced that this change to my mind was more important than the changed my neck muscles. I'd expect the drama created by the claims situation too have a similar effect as that alleviated hypochondrism I had, creating a link from claims to severity that isn't related to fraud at all. Fraud certainly exists, but its role might be much smaller that suggested by that link.
I remember that story from HN as well by the way, might actually have been a contributing factor in my disbelief/hypochondrism: "this pain is real, certainly not that thing that hardly exists outside of the American claims ecosystem". Beware of unexpected side-effects I guess.
(another factor in the difference USA vs rest of the world, entirely unrelated to claims, is likely the "unique" relationship with painkillers. Tho put it in perspective: I lost two trips to France to that injury that I had been looking forward to for months, but didn't take a single pill in the entire ordeal)
If you're looking at casualties from motorcycle incidents, you by definition are not looking at survivors.
Least we forget in 1959 the US car industry was already 60 years old.
The car industry fought tooth and nail against seat belts and other things like collapsible steering columns.
Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988)
I am certain that some car makers did not like the idea, but you cant say that the industry as a whole fought against seatbelts.
To stay in the air, you either need to push a lot of air down (like a helicopter or drone), or have wings and push a lot of air backwards (like an airplane).
The former allows you to hover, but is incredibly loud. The latter allows gliding, but requires a runway for takeoff/landing, not to mention a lot of lateral space for wings.
Unless we have a breakthrough discovery and find a way to create lift without requiring either speed or moving a ton of air, the sci-fi visions of flying cars will remain fiction.