New York’s Tavern on the Green has attracted its fair share of celebrities over the years, but when a sleek saloon car pulled up to the restaurant in Central Park in April 1961, reporters weren’t waiting for a starlet to step out. The car was the star: Survival Car II, as it was known, was a modified 1960 Chevrolet Bel Air retrofitted with futuristic safety features – modifications that engineer Frank Crandell claimed would help passengers survive a 50-mile-per-hour collision. As car designers and inquisitive New Yorkers poked around the vehicle, a question hung in the air: was “Survival Car” an oxymoron?
EVER since the first fatal steam-car accident claimed the life of Irishwoman Mary Ward in 1869, automobiles have had a well-deserved reputation for being dangerous. In the US, early motor cars caused fatalities at about 20 times today’s rate. In 1909, with 305,950 cars registered, the death toll reached 3860, outstripping that from accidents involving horse-drawn vehicles. In 1935, with the number of dead mounting, Reader’s Digest remarked that being in a car crash was “like going over Niagara Falls in a steel barrel full of railroad spikes”. With the more powerful cars of the post-war years designed for style rather than safety, the “Niagaras” became higher and the spikes sharper.
The main problem was not the initial impact but the secondary collision of unbelted occupants with the windscreen, dashboard or steering wheel of their own vehicle. While cars were rarely subjected to crash tests, research on military aircraft showed that humans can survive tremendous decelerations if the force is spread properly across the body. In 1954, test pilot John Stapp walked away from a near-instant stop from 1017 kilometres per hour while strapped into a rocket sled. Yet that same year 33,890 of his fellow Americans died on the road, often in accidents at 40 km/h or slower.
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“The level of safety [in cars] which we accept for ourselves, our wives, and our children is… on a par with shipping fragile, valuable objects loose inside a container,” warned Hugh DeHaven, a crash investigator at Cornell University’s aeronautical laboratory in New York. As part of its pioneering Automotive Crash Injury Research Project, and with the help of two crash test dummies dubbed Thin Man and Half Pint, DeHaven and his colleagues vividly demonstrated how unbelted car drivers could be thrown into angular metal dashboards and unpadded steering wheels that concentrated the force of the impact like a meat cleaver. More often, the dummies were ejected through windscreens and doors, or propelled into rigid steering columns that snapped their necks or impaled their chests.
“Dummies were propelled into rigid steering columns that impaled their chests”
At the Liberty Mutual Insurance Company, chief engineer Frank Crandell looked at his organisation’s diminishing returns from public safety campaigns against dangerous driving, and found in Cornell’s results a compelling alternative strategy for minimising the toll of car crashes. “We decided that if we couldn’t eliminate the causes, the next step was to design against the injury,” he later recalled.
The idea wasn’t entirely new. Chrysler had fitted its DeSoto range with padded dashes as early as 1937, but Detroit’s car-makers were riding a wave of profits that gave them little incentive to change. So Crandell teamed up with Cornell’s researchers to ask the question that Detroit would not: what would make car crashes survivable?
The result was the Survival Car, unveiled in 1957 (pictured above). Edward Dye, director of Cornell’s crash injury project, noted that the design philosophy behind the car was the same as that for packaging any delicate object for shipping: “Use a strong packing case, fasten lid securely, pack tightly, and remove hard objects from the padding.” A conventional if sleek-looking saloon, the Survival Car sported a decidedly futuristic interior. Bucket “capsule seats” were firmly mounted to withstand a force of more than 2 tonnes, each featuring an integral head rest and roll bar and, of course, seat belts. The driver sat in the middle, with the passengers behind. Gone was the spear-like steering column and out went the lethal radio and heater knobs. In their place was an extraordinary hydraulic rudder control – a floor-mounted housing between the driver’s knees, with two stubby handles projecting out from the sides – and a padded dash with rounded and recessed knobs.
Even as the Survival Car was exhibited around the country, Cornell and Liberty Mutual’s crash-test analyses were forcing car manufacturers to change their ways. Grudgingly, they began to fit cars with seat-belt anchorages – although the belts had to be bought separately. Ford offered a “Life Guard” package of seat belts and padded dashes. Many customers bought it, but when Ford’s sales dropped, the belief that “safety doesn’t sell” put the brakes on reforms. An entire safety car seemed out of the question.
Crandell’s team found themselves back where they started. To show that a safe car could be made cheaply and appealingly from existing models, they produced Survival Car II: a 1960 Chevrolet Bel Air retrofitted for safety at minimal cost. The team’s road accident statistics showed that the rigid steering column was the single most dangerous component. Crandell’s rudder control system was thought too avant garde, so this time round he opted for a half-size wheel – to lessen knee injuries – mounted on a telescoping rod that would collapse on impact.
The capsule seats returned in a conventional four-passenger configuration, though the front passenger could swivel to face backwards for extra safety in head-on crashes. The team even added exotic features such as a CO2 fire-extinguishing system and an “Alert-o-Matic”, a device that cut the engine if a driver fell asleep. Yet the car was entirely practical. Crandell logged 240,000 kilometres driving one around the country to exhibitions. Liberty Mutual and Cornell made a point of not seeking any patents on their ideas, as they wanted them to be adopted quickly.
American car firms were still not interested. A safe vehicle like the Survival Car was “completely unrealistic”, proclaimed John Gordon, president of General Motors. “This company is run by salesmen not engineers,” an engineer at Ford observed later. “The priority is styling, not safety.”
What happened next has become all too familiar. Spurning the opportunity presented to them, American car makers watched as others forged ahead. The first car on American roads to embody the Survival Car ideal was not from Detroit but from Solihull in the English midlands. It was the Rover P6 2000 of 1963, whose seat belts, thick padding, safer steering wheel and crumple zones moved consumer campaigner Ralph Nader to declare it “probably the safest car now available for general sale”.
Meanwhile, public unease grew as the death toll on America’s roads climbed. Senators Robert Kennedy and Abraham Ribicoff held hearings in 1965 at which Arjay Miller, Ford’s president, faced withering interrogation over the production versions of the Mustang, which lacked many of the latest safety features fitted in the prototype.
“As a person who drives a Mustang, I think I have all the latest features in it,” Ribicoff observed. “I do not notice that my Mustang has any of these.” Miller responded with the remarkable assertion that the steering wheel protected a driver by restricting the forward range of motion. “Basically, he is going to be speared to death,” retorted Ribicoff. “We have had over 50,000 analyses of accidents involving steering wheels by Cornell… and now you talk as if this is not important.”
The hearings, along with Nader’s scathing attacks on General Motors, led in 1966 to the establishment of the and the first federal oversight of car safety. That year the death toll topped 50,000, and US car-makers would drag their feet for years to come. Today most of the Survival Car’s features – from padded dashes and collapsible steering columns to reflective licence plates – are standard. Crandell’s creations, once a rebuke to the recalcitrant car companies of Detroit, are today preserved there at the .
