Should all road cars be made to WRC spec?
- Thread starter 05XR8
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- SpacedustDaddy
The average person couldn't afford a Model T. The average person can't afford a normal Fiesta. That's what banks and loans are for. No? Ask the average person to pay for a car in full.
Hey, thanks for your thoughts. I'm glad there are Henry Fords and Glickenhauses and Colin Chapmans out there Bucking the trend.
Hey, thanks for your thoughts. I'm glad there are Henry Fords and Glickenhauses and Colin Chapmans out there Bucking the trend.
McLaren
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By having Ford build every Fiesta chassis off the assembly line to M-Sport's standards (shaving off certain parts of the frame in the name of weight reduction & installing a roll cage), it will still immediately affect the car in multiple areas from pricing to how it drives to meeting international requirements to be sold to the public. You're asking Ford to change how they originally engineered the car.
Even if Ford decided to build the same parts M-Sport outsources themselves, they would still push the costs back on to you. It is not the source of the parts that drives up the price, it is the quality of it & WRC cars use some ridiculously high priced, high quality parts to function properly. Whether or not Ford builds this piece or outsources it, it is not the average quality part found in every day cars.
Keep in mind a lot of the things that make a WRC car what it is are probably built for durability, not longevity. Otherwise, these guys wouldn't be building up new race cars/parts every year. Imagine the maintenance costs on trying to DD something built to WRC specs.
It would likely fall apart very soon because it's not made to endure that kind of abuse. Just as a WRC-spec car isn't made to be daily driven.
Even if a car built to WRC specs is theoretically safer than normal, it will sacrifice a large amount everywhere else. And most people will sacrifice the safety of a race car for those things.
- 12,389
- Betelgeuse
- Beeblebrox_237
WRC cars aren't insured, so the team had no choice but to make the car driveable again. A totally new shell would have cost them over £400,000. Additionally, road cars would also be safe in such a situation however they would be much cheaper to replace.
How would making all road cars WRC spec save lives?
This may shock you, but everything you just said is true of road cars, too. Some road cars can forge through water, though almost nobody ever needs to do so, nor would they know how. With normal, roadgoing winter tyres, road cars are fine on ice and snow. And modern cars are great at shrugging off extreme conditions.
Not necessarily. WRC cars are designed to be as light and as strong as possible. The roll cage makes the car very strong, but this is for performance as much as safety. Airbags are a very important safety feature on modern cars, as they help keep the occupants from hitting anything that could injure them, as well as slowing them gradually rather than having them stop abruptly, damaging internal organs. Using a roll cage instead of airbags would necessitate the wearing of a helmet at all times to avoid head injury in a crash.
You can have SUV capabilities or a roll cage, but not both. A roll cage makes ingress and egress very difficult and has a severe impact on load space. Car companies will never do this because it's impractical, expensive, and silly. Consumers will never demand it because it makes the cars less refined, less practical, heavier, less spacious, less stylish, and above all unsafe in an accident.
WRC use faceless helmets so the drivers have better vision around them. They still require the protection. And why are you even bringing up bikes? They're not relevant here.
A tree/telephone pole. Another car is a relatively soft target. It will absorb half of the impact. A tree is a solic boject, and because it has such a small area the force from the impact is concentrated in one area, creating much higher stress levels and therefore much more deformation. You'd know this if you knew anything about engineering.
The issue here is not the safety of the cars, it's the safety of the drivers. Giving these drivers a roll cage and harness would only encourage them to go faster, putting more lives at risk.
No. Road cars use highly engineered crumple zones and monocoque shells to achieve rigidity and safety without compromising interior space or comfort. They're designed to be light and strong, and adding a roll cage would be unnecessary.
Race cars have not adopted airbags because they're too heavy and too difficult to fit. Have you seen the steering wheels race cars have? There's no space for an airbag because they're covered in buttons and displays. Where else would you put an airbag for the driver?
And that's why no sane consumer would want roll cages in road cars.
Race cars require helmets partly to prevent such incidents. HANS devices and heavily bolstered seats also play a part. IT doesn't happen a lot in race cars because they've been designed so that it won't happen. On a road car, however, without ample head protection, adding roll cages to ordinary cars has the potential to cause head injury or death to thousands of people.This hitting ones head on a roll cage. I have sat in various racing cars and I personally haven't raced them or crashed one. I've not heard of hitting your head on the cage. Most in-car crashes I see are the steering wheel being ripped out of the drivers hand and the harnesses and Hans device with the seat preventing the driver from moving too much. I'll be happy to watch a compilation of drivers hitting their heads on roll cages. Please enlighten me.
Ferrari and Mercedes are not mainstream. Porsche fits a cage as standard to the GT3 RS, but you don't see consumers demanding them in ordinary cars. I wonder why that could be...
See above. Do you think a child is going to fit into that back seat? I don't think you understand how much space roll cages take up.
Have you seen them struggling to get in and out? I've been on several ride days and it always takes a long time for people to get into the cars. You have to crawl around the roll cage, figure out how the harness works, and then later figure out how to get out. It's tricky and very, very impractical.
Relative to what? Racing buckets are not comfortable over long distances when compared with a normal seat. And suspension systems are already optimised on rad cars for their intended purpose.
Road cars have all of that, too, and at a much lower cost.Making a WRC car into a road car? Why not just mass produce the WRC car in the first place?
WRC car to road car: it already has
latest engine technology
headlights
btakelights
indicators
seats
safety harnesses
handbrake
wipers
flappy paddles/circular paddle
tinted windows
instrument panel
fire extinguisher
spare tyre and jack
radio/navigation
number plates
and most likely a safety rating of 5-Stars
It needs:
muffler/silencer(s)
sound proofing
Some welds to keep water out
stamped steel body panels
False. You can't magic up extra space after you've filled the interior with metal tubing. And a roll cage would cause much more NVH to be transmitted into the interior, making the car loud and unrefined.
I'm an engineering student. And I can tell you right now that it's an absurd idea that will never be practical or marketable. It's not a matter of engineering the roll cage for the car. It just won't work. Road cars and race cars are built with completely different design briefs. A road car has to be cheap, refined, comfortable, economical, and safe. A race car has to be fast, safe, and even faster. The differences in purpose mean that the two types of cars go about safety in two different ways. Each has the type of safety features and engineering that is more appropriate for the application.
You've already admitted to not being an engineer and not knowing about engineering. I appreciate the faith in us, but we're not miracle workers. Roll cages in road cars would be unsafe and unmarketable. You don't need a roll cage to make a car safe. Look a Volvo. They're incredibly focused on safety, so much so that they've publicly stated that their goal is that from 2020 onwards they want to eliminate deaths in Volvo cars entirely. They're not using roll cages to do this. They're being smart and using advanced materials and manufacturing processes to build strong shells full of passive and active safety features.
The average person can afford a Fiesta, otherwise they wouldn't buy it. Taking out a loan might be a step in that process, but that person must still pay back that loan. Suggesting that everyone should borrow money so they can buy a £400,000 car is ridiculous, and it's exactly the king of thinking that caused the financial crisis of 2008.
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Also of note is that the GT3 RS roll cage is only a half cage, and Porsche (probably correctly) interpreted US crash regulations as making it illegal to even install that.
Fit pretty much every criteria you've been talking about so far. Even the (carbon fiber) bodywork was built around the FIA-spec roll cage at the factory, and the car was praised for how civilized it was considering how it was constructed. The 4 point racing seats were even designed to be as close to the regular MG seats as possible. Now, ignoring that all that contributed heavily towards how wildly expensive it ended up being, what is that painstakingly designed civilized purpose built integrated roll caged car most known for ten years later?
Probably when Clarkson smashed the side of his head hard into the roll cage because of something so simple as not maintaining a drift.
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So because a person can afford to take up a loan for a normal car, they could just as well get a loan for a car that was 4 times more expensive? Do you think loans are free?
I'm not sure how you view loans, but generally, you shouldn't take up loans you can't afford. A person who can afford to take up a loan for a ford fiesta could absolutely have afforded to pay for that car up front, had they just saved up for it instead. They choose not to because they think the cost of the loan is worth it for getting the car instantly.
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- 4,543
- Bay Area, CA
- Zenith113
You can try to turn cars into death-proof boxes by making them into impractical, cost-prohibitive tanks, or you can realize that trying to keep squishy occupants alive in the event of a high speed crash is just not feasible. Humans were never designed to take those forces.
The solution is to just not crash. This can be achieved with self-driving cars for soon-to-be similar money as your suggestion.
The solution is to just not crash. This can be achieved with self-driving cars for soon-to-be similar money as your suggestion.
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Won't be long until self-driving capabilities will be a lot cheaper than this suggestion, I think. Good semi-self-driving capabilities will probably be standard very very soon. Lane keep, auto-braking, auto-speedlimit, auto-wipers, auto-headlights, all that added together and that's pretty damn close to auto-driving if you ask me
.-edit- I bet we'll soon see sensors that accurately measure road surface water levels (and snow, or even dirt) ahead of you, and reduce speed as necessary too.
These systems can detect cars in way worse visibility than humans as well. If other cars have devices that transmit signals for other cars to detect, they can even see the cars through solid objects, as long as they're not dense enough to block the radio waves.
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- 1,625
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In South Australia a full roll cage is not allowed and you will not be able to register the car for road use.
If a car manufacturer released a car that comes with a full roll cage, then South Australia would likely be ruled out as a viable market at the least.
If a car manufacturer released a car that comes with a full roll cage, then South Australia would likely be ruled out as a viable market at the least.
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- SpacedustDaddy
Laws mandate certain safety features for Cars. One airbag was the norm, them passenger airbags. Now every car bar a Caterham comes with two airbags. Laws are put in place to comply to. So, if a roll cage law is passed requiring manufacturers to include them in their cars, they'd have to comply. Plus, we're not speaking of an add-on, cheaply engineered roll cage. Thanks for your thoughts.
In response to various posts about my understanding of engineering: I know how cars work. That's not the same as not knowing how to construct a roll cage. I've owned a fair bit in my 44years, worked on my own and in a few dealers. You're preaching to the choir.
Not being able to construct a roll cage does not mean I don't know how they function or how they fit in a car or not knowing how much space they take up. If anyone has that knowledge of how to design and engineer roll cages for daily use, and are that clever, have go and come up with some solutions. I'm posing a question.
As for entering and exiting a car with a roll cage, even drivers practice getting in and out. Look at Gordon Murray's F1 and iStream. Seems impractical to get in and out, but the main focus is driver command. Once they're in.
As for a roll cage making a driver want to go faster, now that's rubbish. A driver will want to go faster in anything from a kei car to supercar. But thanks for your thoughts.
@Joey D That's normal for every early 1980's car you described. 👍
@Pseudpod you're most likely right, even though that's a whole other discussion.
In response to various posts about my understanding of engineering: I know how cars work. That's not the same as not knowing how to construct a roll cage. I've owned a fair bit in my 44years, worked on my own and in a few dealers. You're preaching to the choir.
Not being able to construct a roll cage does not mean I don't know how they function or how they fit in a car or not knowing how much space they take up. If anyone has that knowledge of how to design and engineer roll cages for daily use, and are that clever, have go and come up with some solutions. I'm posing a question.
As for entering and exiting a car with a roll cage, even drivers practice getting in and out. Look at Gordon Murray's F1 and iStream. Seems impractical to get in and out, but the main focus is driver command. Once they're in.
As for a roll cage making a driver want to go faster, now that's rubbish. A driver will want to go faster in anything from a kei car to supercar. But thanks for your thoughts.
@Joey D That's normal for every early 1980's car you described. 👍
@Pseudpod you're most likely right, even though that's a whole other discussion.
- 1,625
- Australia
- GTP_JTV
There's no law in Australia for cars to have anything in particular(in safety terms) but must meet a minimum level of safety. If any one country brought in such a law then it would have to be of a large enough economic area for manufacturers to revise current or future models to fit those laws.
If Australia brought in a must have full roll cage law, would Mercedes rush to change their cars to suit?
McLaren
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To further your point, notice these types of cars manufacturers produce every so often also don't generally make them with a full cage. So, as you make a good note of, they already affect the practicality of the car before affecting the driver himself.Ferrari and Mercedes are not mainstream. Porsche fits a cage as standard to the GT3 RS, but you don't see consumers demanding them in ordinary cars. I wonder why that could be...
See above. Do you think a child is going to fit into that back seat? I don't think you understand how much space roll cages take up.
Joey D
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- GTP Joey
I've driven several 80's cars and none of them are like that. They aren't as nice as something 30 years newer, but they're still better than my race car to drive around.
As for the rollcage, wouldn't it just make more sense for companies to increase the pillar and roof support for their cars instead of taking up all the room in the car with a cage that really won't be needed?
- 20,681
- TenEightyOne
- TenEightyOne
That's the part of the thread that surprises me... OP mentions that an engine could be restarted after immersion in water (and attention from a team of trained mechanics) and then seems to suggest that its somehow related to the very specific racing equipment in the WRC Fiesta. To my mind the safety specs and the behaviour of immersed engines are two different things.
I had an Audi that was flooded to above the headlights which still started the next morning (much to my disappointment). Still got the insurance in the end, thank goodness
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- Neomone
@05XR8
Tell you what, you go and put a cage, race seats and harnesses in your daily driver. It won't cost you that much, a few grand for a CAMS spec cage and a few more for decent seats and harnesses. And some helmets I suppose.
Then you come back in a few weeks and tell us why more cars aren't built this way. Most of us already know, but it seems that you'll actually need to try it to see.
Tell you what, you go and put a cage, race seats and harnesses in your daily driver. It won't cost you that much, a few grand for a CAMS spec cage and a few more for decent seats and harnesses. And some helmets I suppose.
Then you come back in a few weeks and tell us why more cars aren't built this way. Most of us already know, but it seems that you'll actually need to try it to see.
- 51,174
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- SpacedustDaddy
I've driven a 2014 Forester XT up to the bonnet in water on a Subaru test day in Melbourne. Good car. Handled steep inclines going up and down with no hands and hill descent control.
You might have re-read the OP about that water immersion and starting the car bit.
You might have re-read the OP about that water immersion and starting the car bit.
- 23,973
- It/It
- GTP_TheCracker
Having recently survived a high speed series of rolls in a fully caged car, i can safely say that without a helmet and hans device, not to mention a rigid seat designed to hold and protect it's occupant from lateral movement and side impacts and intrusions, i would have certainly sustained serious damage to my head due to direct impact with the roll cage.
If you have a roll cage in a car, you'll need to wear a helmet and a 4-point harness at the very least. Anything less and you'll likely have more injuries inflicted on your body from various parts of the cage than you would though impacts with solid objects and other vehicles which all modern cars protect you from via built in crash structures.
Cages and harnesses make a vehicle incredibly hard to live with in daily life too. The harnesses stop you from reaching controls and are uncomfortable to wear if tightened to the degree where they'll actually stop you from shaking around in an impact. The cage makes it a pain in the arse to get in and out of a car - and impossible to have rear seats due to the need to have lateral support bars. They also add considerable weight.
A cage is a very rigid structure. A body shell is much less so. The flex of one but not the other would cause so many creaks and squeaks in a car that consumers of this day and age wouldn't put up with.
If you have a roll cage in a car, you'll need to wear a helmet and a 4-point harness at the very least. Anything less and you'll likely have more injuries inflicted on your body from various parts of the cage than you would though impacts with solid objects and other vehicles which all modern cars protect you from via built in crash structures.
Cages and harnesses make a vehicle incredibly hard to live with in daily life too. The harnesses stop you from reaching controls and are uncomfortable to wear if tightened to the degree where they'll actually stop you from shaking around in an impact. The cage makes it a pain in the arse to get in and out of a car - and impossible to have rear seats due to the need to have lateral support bars. They also add considerable weight.
A cage is a very rigid structure. A body shell is much less so. The flex of one but not the other would cause so many creaks and squeaks in a car that consumers of this day and age wouldn't put up with.
- 36,656
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- GTP_daan
Welcome to every car currently on the road.
You can make a car that will not yield (much) in an accident, but the energy has to go somewhere. It'll then find the first deformable, squishy bit it can which will be the driver. Car surviving but driver not is not a situation I want to find myself in.
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I think the idea of an integrated cage, built into the car, far enough from the driver to be out of harms way during an accident isn't neccesarily bad. The problem is that it needs to be coupled with a harness, helmet and side bolsters to properly do it's job. I really, really don't want to put a helmet on every time I feel like a Big Mac.
The better option would be somehow encapsulating the driver in the seat with an automatic, tight and smart restraint system. Nothing like it exists because you run into the issues of poor reach, visibility and comfort. Not to mention it'd be extremely difficult, expensive and complicated to create, implement and market a device that basically traps you in your car.
Self driving cars are coming quickly enough that we won't have to worry about safety at all soon. Without the burden of designing a car around it's controls and visibility to the outside world, manufacturers will be able to go crazy. I can eventually see us wrapped in a quiet, comfy and safe little cocoon as we waft from place to place happily Facebooking while the car gets us where we need to be.
I'm not looking forward to it, but as long as the robots aren't mandatory and stay off the race tracks, I couldn't give a damn. I feel more safe knowing that a machine programmed very specifically by a team of highly skilled engineers is coming at me than the thought that a drunk, distracted or stupid person could be.
The better option would be somehow encapsulating the driver in the seat with an automatic, tight and smart restraint system. Nothing like it exists because you run into the issues of poor reach, visibility and comfort. Not to mention it'd be extremely difficult, expensive and complicated to create, implement and market a device that basically traps you in your car.
Self driving cars are coming quickly enough that we won't have to worry about safety at all soon. Without the burden of designing a car around it's controls and visibility to the outside world, manufacturers will be able to go crazy. I can eventually see us wrapped in a quiet, comfy and safe little cocoon as we waft from place to place happily Facebooking while the car gets us where we need to be.
I'm not looking forward to it, but as long as the robots aren't mandatory and stay off the race tracks, I couldn't give a damn. I feel more safe knowing that a machine programmed very specifically by a team of highly skilled engineers is coming at me than the thought that a drunk, distracted or stupid person could be.
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@TheCracker- I accidentally clicked post when I wasn't finished explaining my reasoning yet. I've expanded on what I mean in the edit to the above post.
- 23,800
- Philippines
I know how we can build a cage that won't take up space inside the car, yet which will provide excellent crash protection for the driver and passengers.
We'll build it into the monocoque.
Ergo:
Well... not all cars are built to the same strength as, say, a Subaru... which is arguably safer than @TheCracker 's fully caged Cortina in a crash... as Subaru adds extra welds and reinforcements into all the pillars.
A roll cage is simply a way of adding stiffness back to a car that's lost it due to excessive lightening, or that has never had it in the first place. In your street car, the pillars and roof hoops are already a cage.
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Now, if what you want is for safety organizations to mandate roll cages... that's what new rollover requirements and small overlap impact requirements do. They require manufacturers to strengthen the corners and top of the safety cell.
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If a car meets those requirements... then no cage required.
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As for racing buckets... you brought up child seats earlier. That's a poor example. Plastic child seats are not really as strong as regular car seats. The only reason they work is they only have to hold about 10-15 pounds of child. Scale them up for an adult and they'll be unwieldy, impractical and very, very expensive.
There's also the problem of the plastic itself losing strength and becoming brittle after a few years' exposure to sunlight and heat... uh... no thanks... I'll stick with a standard seat, thank you.
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I think it's a swell idea to upgrade to four or five point belts for cars... and to have side bolsters for the torso and neck for protection in a crash... but there's little profit in terms of sales or safety statistics in going that far past what we have now.
- 12,122
- Liverpool
- CARBOYXJR
Let's just run this past, since it's the one thing about the argument that really doesn't sit with me:
A racing car is designed to as light, rigid and fast as possible - it has no other purpose than to simply be quick. A road car can be quick, but it also, fundamentally, has to be practical - it has no other purpose than to to deliver occupants from A to B. Quadrupling costs, removing all essence of function and usability in the name of chasing safety *with performance* - that's why they have such horribly impractical things as exposed rollcages - is only going to alienate, frustrate, annoy, quite possibly injure (just imagine the US lawsuit stories to stem from people whacking their knees on intrusive metal poles), and completely nullify the point of having a car for daily use.
By this point, people would be wondering why they didn't just take the bus. That's indeed if they hadn't too been touched; rather than having to work your way through a steel maze every time you wanted a trip down the road. Imagine the joy.
A racing car is designed to as light, rigid and fast as possible - it has no other purpose than to simply be quick. A road car can be quick, but it also, fundamentally, has to be practical - it has no other purpose than to to deliver occupants from A to B. Quadrupling costs, removing all essence of function and usability in the name of chasing safety *with performance* - that's why they have such horribly impractical things as exposed rollcages - is only going to alienate, frustrate, annoy, quite possibly injure (just imagine the US lawsuit stories to stem from people whacking their knees on intrusive metal poles), and completely nullify the point of having a car for daily use.
By this point, people would be wondering why they didn't just take the bus. That's indeed if they hadn't too been touched; rather than having to work your way through a steel maze every time you wanted a trip down the road. Imagine the joy.
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This brings to mind a product that won "American Inventor" a few years ago (looking it up... nine years, actually)... a next-generation child safety seat.
http://inventorspot.com/articles/update_anecia_survival_capsule_winner_5013
I imagine it would be extremely safe indeed... The seat floats freely within a spherical mount, so that at impact, it swings so the g-forces go downward through the child's back into the cushion, instead of the child being thrown against the harness. (and no matter how tightly you put those belts on, having the child pushed into them at high speed can potentially cause at least minor injury... not to mention issues of whiplash!)
But the seat is big. It's bulky. The spherical construction means that once the child outgrows it, you have to chuck it to buy a new one (as per the picture, seems like two years of age would be the limit). It takes up more seat space than a regular child seat, so instead of being able to fit it in the center of a car with two adults riding beside it... it takes up half the back seat. It would be a hard sell against current seats, which are already safe, and which, when installed facing backwards, provide the same kind of protection in a head-on impact (a rear impact will never have the same amount of force).
It would be a tough, tough sell.
The product went into development with Evenflo, who, after working with the inventor for a while, came to the same conclusion. He's still looking for investors... but I don't think it'll ever be a commercial success. Especially now that government mandates side impact protection for regular seats.
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Now if the government mandated that all child seats should be gyroscopic...
http://inventorspot.com/articles/update_anecia_survival_capsule_winner_5013
I imagine it would be extremely safe indeed... The seat floats freely within a spherical mount, so that at impact, it swings so the g-forces go downward through the child's back into the cushion, instead of the child being thrown against the harness. (and no matter how tightly you put those belts on, having the child pushed into them at high speed can potentially cause at least minor injury... not to mention issues of whiplash!)
But the seat is big. It's bulky. The spherical construction means that once the child outgrows it, you have to chuck it to buy a new one (as per the picture, seems like two years of age would be the limit). It takes up more seat space than a regular child seat, so instead of being able to fit it in the center of a car with two adults riding beside it... it takes up half the back seat. It would be a hard sell against current seats, which are already safe, and which, when installed facing backwards, provide the same kind of protection in a head-on impact (a rear impact will never have the same amount of force).
It would be a tough, tough sell.
The product went into development with Evenflo, who, after working with the inventor for a while, came to the same conclusion. He's still looking for investors... but I don't think it'll ever be a commercial success. Especially now that government mandates side impact protection for regular seats.
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Now if the government mandated that all child seats should be gyroscopic...
- 23,973
- It/It
- GTP_TheCracker
👍 That's a good point that i hadn't thought of. Both the seat and belts i used have a 'best before' date. The helmet and suit do too. People can't be trusted to change their timing belt every 60k miles. They'll certainly not be trusted to do the same with their seats and belts.
Badly grazed shins were the only obvious injuries i sustained. They could have easily been broken shins due to the cage bar that runs below the dash.
- 23,800
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I was actually talking about child seats, but that's also an interesting point... the fiberglass in lightweight racing buckets won't maintain its strength forever. And those things don't get the daily wear and tear that regular seats do. You will climb into a racing bucket perhaps thirty or forty times a year if you race for a living. If you drive your personal car everyday to work, you will climb in and out of it perhaps four hundred times a year or more.
- 36,656
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- GTP_daan
As long as it's not a 'use by' date.
