Editorial: How Forbes Spiked Smart Safety Slam

Robert Farago
by Robert Farago

The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) recently performed a series of crash tests to garner widespread MSM coverage to justify their enormous operating budget to the insurance companies that pay for the “don’t tell anyone we’re not from the government” organization’s existence—I mean demonstrate the heretofore unimaginable fact that small/lightweight cars get the snot kicked out of them when they collide front-to-front with medium size cars, despite the fact that the small cars involved received the IIHS’ best possible frontal crash ratings. All this came as no surprise to Mike Dulberger, founder of InformedForLife.org.

Mr. Dulberger is an engineer with an OCD vehicle safety thing. He reckons the IIHS and National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA) safety ratings are “confusing, conflicting and incomplete.” Amongst other criticisms, Dulberger slates the two heavyweights for failing to adequately consider the contribution of a given vehicle’s mass to its overall safety. So Dulberger developed has own analysis—SCORE (Statistical Combination Of Risk Elements)—to rectify this and other shortcomings.

As you might expect, the small/lightweight cars crash tested by the IIHS fared badly under Dulberger’s SCORE system. Of the three small vehicles tested, the Smart Fortwo held special significance for Mr. Dulberger. Sherman, set the wayback machine for October 2008 . . .

On that fateful date, Dulberger was asked to share his SCORE analysis with Forbes (magazine), as part of their annual “ 2009 Most Dangerous Vehicles” article. Dulberger duly fingered the Smart (that doesn’t sound right) as a bit of a . . . well . . . you know.

“Not only does the smart have a high risk due to its low weight (1800 lb),’ Dulberger asserts, ‘it also has the lowest NHTSA frontal rating (three stars, passenger side) of any 2009 vehicle. And because of its top heavy design, the smart has almost twice the rollover risk of the average passenger car.”

In fact, the Smart received one of Informedforlife.org’s lowest ever SCOREs: 130. According to Dulberger, the number represents more than twice his system’s “acceptable” fatality risk. All this he told Forbes.

Unfortunately (for the consumer), Forbes forgot to publish Dulberger’s smart conclusions. He believes the sin of omission was the direct result of objections raised by Smart USA’s President, David Schembri.

Before Forbes ran its piece, Schembri somehow got a hold of Dulberger’s phone number and gave him an earful. The Smart guy declared flat out that his car was safe. After all, the IIHS had rated it “GOOD.” Schembri told Dulberger any assertion to the contrary was wrong, irresponsible and, how shall we put this? Actionable.

And so Dulberger’s smart safety slam was spiked. This is what they published instead:

What’s most important for buyers is finding cars that are safe but also suited to their individual needs. The 1,808-pound, $11,990 Smart Fortwo, for example, is the smallest car on the road and received solid safety ratings for both crashes and rollovers–it didn’t come close to making our list. But that doesn’t make the car the safest or best for a large or tall person.

“The NHTSA data simply does not support that conclusion,” Dulberger insists. “Three stars for passenger side frontal impact is the lowest rating by NHTSA for any vehicle, and three stars rollover is the lowest rating by NHTSA for any passenger car.

“It’s hard to believe that this misrepresentation is a mistake given the fact that I pointed these same issues out to them. . . I guess Forbes believes that ‘safety first’ means testing a manufacturers reaction to its editorial content before publishing.”

Or not, when everyone else goes first. And even in that case, well, it’s hard to read this excerpt from Forbes‘ coverage of the recent IIHS smart debacle the same way, knowing Dulberger’s tale.

In the crash test between the C-Class and Fortwo, for example, the Smart bounced off the C-Class and turned 450 degrees before landing and displacing the instrument panel and steering wheel through the cockpit. The C-Class had almost no intrusion of the front gears into the passenger area.

Granted, the IIHS tests are much more severe than government safety standards mandate, as small-car proponents often note. The Smart Fortwo meets all U.S. government crash-test standards, including a five-star side-crash rating, notes Dave Schembri, the president of Smart USA. It also earned the highest scores for front- and side-crash worthiness from the IIHS itself.

As for the pressure that Smart may or may not have been brought to bear on Forbes, that may or may not have involved advertising, what did you expect? The truth about cars?

Robert Farago
Robert Farago

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  • T2 T2 on Apr 17, 2009

    -ghillie : great post. When the Chrysler liquidation season ends and the Tea Party anti-bailout protests fizzle, perhaps then Robert can get something going on The Truth About Car Insurance. I see a real problem when a vehicle which has depreciated to 20% of its original value costs close to $1000 to insure. This could be the reason that there is a preponderance of heavier vehicles like SUVs passenger vans and pickups which seem to ferry just a single occupant for 95% of the time. More people might consider owning a second smaller vehicle as an option if the insurance premium wasn't so high.

  • Golden2husky Golden2husky on Apr 18, 2009
    Some of you science and safety guys help me out here, but my thought on the Smart has been that they say that this safety zone is basically uncrushable…. Ok, accepting that, all the energy of a crash has to go somewhere…. I’m thinking that if you hit a wall, you’d better hope your airbag really absorbs a ton of energy (or whatever you weigh at 5 g’s) and if you hit an SUV, you’re going to bounce like a ping pong ball.... The theory of the smart's really rigid structure is that it won't deform enough to allow the passenger cell to be compromised too much. They have said that they are using the other vehicle's crumple zone to absorb the crash energy, which, if you look at multi car crash footage, you will see the smart doing just that. However, what about striking a fixed object? Now, that super stiff structure has limited ability to allow the occupant to decelerate slowly enough to survive. The problem with all this crash data is that it is too easy to pick and choose what information will support your opinion. Think about mass this way. Kinetic energy is mass time velocity squared. The speed (velocity) very quickly becomes the dominant player because its contribution grows with the square of the speed. So why does mass get so much credit? Because all that crash energy has to be dissipated. That means the ability to absorb and deflect the energy away from the occupant becomes the issue when trying to live through a crash. Larger vehicles offer easier methods to dissipate that energy. To do so in a smaller car requires much more design effort (and cost) to manage that crash energy. So, with large vehicles you get that crash protection cheaply via more crush space, rather than by serious engineering that would required to manage it well in a smaller car. Check out this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3ygYUYia9I In this video, a 15 year old Volvo is humbled by a modern small car in a 40 MPH offset crash. Keep in mind that crash tests only take into account how vehicles will perform in a controlled environment. Driver behavior is fully eliminated. Real world data is totally influenced by driver behavior, and that is something that we can't engineer out of a car. We can only try to mange it. Like it or not, younger drivers take more risks, and any vehicle they choose is going to be dragged down in real world crash data. 2 door Shadows rolled at four times the rate of 4 door Shadows, which appealed to a much older age group. More costly vehicles seem to do better, but, again, is this due to added safety features, size, or the older, more affluent owners? All these factor influence how different vehicles perform out there. About 8 years ago, somebody from NHSTA had suggested the best way to save more lives was to increase the weight of vehicles by a couple of hundred pounds. I don't know what planet he came from, but vehicles have been growing by way more than that over the last 20 years. What he should have said was that the disparity in size and heights are creating a hazardous condition, instead of focusing just on weight.
  • CoastieLenn No idea why, but nothing about a 4Runner excites me post-2004. To me, they're peak "try-hard", even above the Wrangler and Gladiator.
  • AZFelix A well earned anniversary.Can they also attend to the Mach-E?
  • Jalop1991 The intermediate shaft and right front driveshaft may not be fully engaged due to suspected improper assembly by the supplier. Over time, partial engagement can cause damage to the intermediate shaft splines. Damaged shaft splines may result in unintended vehicle movement while in Park if the parking brake is not engagedGee, my Chrysler van automatically engages the parking brake when we put it in Park. Do you mean to tell me that the idjits at Kia, and the idjit buyers, couldn't figure out wanting this in THEIR MOST EXPENSIVE VEHICLE????
  • Dukeisduke I've been waiting to see if they were going to do something special for the 60th Anniversary. I was four years old when the Mustang was introduced. I can remember that one of our neighbors bought a '65 coupe (they were all titled as '65 models, even the '64-1/2 cars), and it's the first one I can remember seeing. In the '90s I knew an older gentleman that owned a '64-1/2 model coupe with the 260 V8.
  • SCE to AUX "...the complete Mustang model lineup to peruse"Will the fake Mustang show up, too?
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