Prius's weight a concern?

I drove my 1800lb 1985 CRX HF for 275,000 miles. I didn't experience any bad effects from being too light. IMO, the Prius is way too heavy.

 

My Clunker a 1987 Volvo Station Wagon weighed in 3032 lbs.
The automatic transmission version 3169 lbs.
And we all know the reputation Volvo's have for safety.

 

Why do you care about weight? Care to fill us in?

Tom

 

The Prius weighs 27 pounds more than my first car - a '65 Pontiac LeMans. Wow.

 

Those wacky telephone poles! When will they ever learn to quit bashing Honda's for fun! LOL!

 

Okay, that makes sense. It's the old Tank Argument, where the person driving the tank wins in a collision. The basic problem with this argument is that it depends on how and where the extra weight is deployed. If it is used in a ridged body and frame, the tank will survive but it's occupants won't. Crash survivability takes a lot more than mass. Crush zones, air bags, and other sophisticated features are far more important than mass, unless we are talking about huge mismatches. If you get hit by a train, airbags aren't going to help.

Tom

 

ound:

Nice one.:thumb:

 

Exactly.

All else equal, weight is an advantage in a head-on crash with another vehicle moving toward you. The less change in momentum of your own vehicle, the less deceleration and energy transferred to the occupants. Of course, all else is rarely equal. Those rigid frame truck-based pickups and SUVs of the 80s and 90s were notoriously bad in crashes. They fare OK against smaller and lighter vehicles simply because of the mass and height advantage. Against walls, poles and other similar vehicles, they were death traps. They didn't crush well, so all the energy was transferred to the passengers in crashes:-(

It used to be nearly impossible to compare vehicles that varied much in mass. There's a nice tool that uses statistical data to let you compare them- www.informedforlife.org . Read the fine print, though. The results suffer when any piece of crash test data is missing and then a typical result is used as a placeholder. So, it's not ideal for comparing models like the 3rd gen Prius, at least until a full set of NHTSA results are available. Once they are released, you can also plug them into the calculator on the website even before they update their charts.

 

Hi Glider,

There have been a few crashes talked about on here. One between a Silverado (Cell Phone Yapping driver), and a Prius, where the Silverado was lifted off the ground by the Prius, and it looked to me that the left A pillar of the Prius was crumped when it hit the underside of the Silverado engine. There was a report that the most serious injuries encured in that crash, by the Prius driver, were due to the full paint cans he was carrying with the rear seats down, that were thrown forward in the crash and impacted the driver's head.

This illustrates Tom's point, that crashes are very complicated, and it depends on where the weight is deployed and the shape of the vehicle. In the example above, the heavy MG2 end of the transmission, and the sloping hood of the Prius served to cause the crash energy to be disipated lifting the Silverado upward, and the drivers compartment remained substatially intact.

There was another crash where a drunk 20 something Prius driver got going the wrong way on an interstate. She hit a border patrol officer in an S 10, body-on-frame pickup head on. The front half the S10 was demolished, and the Prius not nearly as badly collapsed. I believe both died however, as a 120 - 150 mph closing speed head-on collision is unsurvivable, even if the vehicles do not collapse.

 

I wish my other car were as light as my prius...

 

Poles can be among the worst things to hit because the crash forces are concentrated into a small area of the front end, rather than being spread out over half (like the IIHS offset) of the front end or the full width (like NHTSA). The mass of your vehicle is generally not an advantage when hitting an object that remains fixed, like a pole or wall. That's also why even the biggest truck based monster SUVs and pickups often fared very poorly in single vehicle crashes against fixed objects, despite their mass.

The vehicle is hopefully designed to crush in order to absorb energy and protect the passenger compartment from intrusion. Unfortunately, that can mean a lot of front end damage, even at relatively low speeds.

 

In my line of work, I've seen cars wrapped around a telephone pole and no damage to the pole. I've seen poles snapped and the car able to drive away. The damage is no indication of the force.

 

toyota purposely put the passenger cage very far from the front of the bumper reinforcement bar, the use of aluminum in the hood and hatch creates a huge crumple zone.

 

You should have kept the 66 mustang in the garage covered up. What would it be worth today?

I have noticed the doors sound a little thin when I close them..