Seats in American cars turned out to be dangerous
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Seats in American cars turned out to be dangerous

The chairs comply with the standard adopted in 1966 (VIDEO)

A Tesla Model Y recently crashed in the US, causing the back of the front passenger seat to roll back. The seat itself is FMVSS 207 compliant, which has specific placement and anchorage requirements. However, it turned out that these requirements do not affect safety, and this is not due to the design used by Tesla.

Seats in American cars turned out to be dangerous

“As strange as it sounds, the standard is a very old FMVSS 207. It was adopted in 1966 and describes the testing of seats without seat belts. After that, nobody changed it for decades, and it is completely obsolete,” reveals TS Tech Americas engineer George Hetzer.

FMVSS 207 provides for static load testing and in no way reflects the pressure that can only arise in a collision, it is huge for tens of milliseconds.

Hetzer has a rudimentary explanation for this omission. Crash test programs have a fairly limited budget and are mainly focused on two types of accidents - frontal and side. In the US, there is another test - a blow to the back, which checks if fuel is leaking in the fuel tank.

Reavis V. Toyota Crash Test Footage

“We have asked the NHTSA many times to update the standards and this will likely become a reality shortly after two senators introduce the bill. The seat safety standard used in Europe is completely different, but we don't think it's good enough either,” commented Jason Levin, executive director of the National Automotive Safety Center.

Eliminating this omission will lead to a decrease in the number of road fatalities in the United States, he said. The statistics of the Ministry of Transport show that in 2019, 36 thousand people died in car accidents in the country.

Reavis V. Toyota Crash Test Footage

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