[geeks] Mac definitions

[Mark Benson]

On 12 Jul 2011, at 19:54, Dan Sikorski wrote:

>> A vandal w/ a baseball bat could 'total' such a car with only a few well
>> placed hits (OK, maybe a sledgehammer) - that seems wrong.
>
> Would that even trigger the sensors?  Are they impact or inertial?  Do they
work if the car is turned off?  Regardless, it's easy for a vandal with a
baseball bat or sledgehammer to total a car without triggering the airbags.

A vandal with a sledgehammer would probably puncture or split the panels on
many modern cars, especially alloy ones, and can cause significant damage,
again, to the monocoque, which is often not repairable safely due to the
structural nature of the fabrication. Like Dan said, a sufficiently violent
hooligan could cause a threshold amount of damage with a sledgehammer for an
insurance company to write the car off without  triggering the airbags.

>> That said, I do appreciate the logic of an accident not being the mfg.
>> concern, warranty-wise...
>
> Even if the car is designed for as much serviceability as is feasible, it
would probably still not be worthwhile to design collision-related parts to be
cheaper.  If you consider the small number of vehicles involved in such
accidents and rapid depreciation of the value of cars, it's not difficult to
imagine that these options have been weighed and are not cost-effective.
Would you pay substantially more for a car that can have the airbags replaced
cheaply?

Fact follows, as I said before, that the *majority* of collisions involving
modern cars write them off anyway. some could be repaired but the insurance
companies get uneasy about insuring a heavily repaired car these days and also
the costs are, as previously stated, often prohibitive.

--
Mark Benson

My Blog:
<http://markbenson.org/blog>
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"Never send a human to do a machine's job..."