A historical look at crash testing
Narrator: Last year, according to National Highway Traffic Safety Administration), the rates of fatalities and injuries from traffic crashes fell to their lowest level since 1949, a fact that’s even more remarkable when you think of how many more cars are on the road.
Jeremy Anwyl: In general the car companies deserve a huge amount of credit in terms of introducing generation after generation of vehicles where safety technologies have really helped the driver, if there is an accident, survive an accident
Narrator: In the 1930s, Chevrolet became one of the first companies to crash test their vehicles.
Albert Ware: In the earlier days when we ran barrier tests for Chevrolet vehicles we would look at how the structure of the vehicle would interact with a barrier face.
Narrator: Chevrolet introduced crash test dummies in the 1950s to measure the effect of crashes on occupants. By the 1970s Chevrolet’s Hybrid 2 Dummy, with sensors to measure impact, was selected by the government as the standard for the industry.
Albert Ware: Today, we are much more advanced than we were in the past. On the new Chevrolet Sonic for example, we ran for every barrier test, 100 computer simulated models
Narrator: Recently, the Insurance Institute for highway safety released their Top Safety Picks for 2012, and shows just how far crash testing has come
