Quote:
Originally Posted by Evan Smith
Chad,
Are you certain that OE seats are deisgned to fail? What engineering data do you have on this subject. I'm not trying to argue, I'm quite curious about your theory on this. I've never heard of this and I am around a lot of OE stuff.
I've heard of crumple zones, but never a seat designed to fail. Keeping the driver and passengers properly in place is very important in crash survival. Let the metal around the driver's compartment crumple and let the air bags protect the occupants. How can the seat belts do their job if the seat holding the driver fails?
Personally, I'd like to stick with my stock seat, although race would be safer. In circle track and road course racing, much technology has gone into building crash-worthy race seats.
But I will say that I've seen a lot of racers wearing their 5-way harness incorrectly. Your pelvis is a strong part of your body so the lap belt should be tightened first and it should be low on your hips (assuming you have it installed correctly) and as tight as you can stand (within reason). When the shoulder harness is pulled tight, the lap belt and latch should not ride up into your sternum, where your body has very little strength. Also, the mount for the shoulder harness should be fixed or set in line with the angle of the harness, not stright up, so when it is stressed in a crash, it has little chance of flexing, bending or breaking. This is stuff that is rarely, if ever, checked in tech.
Evan
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Evan, I don't have any empirical data, although I do have a good friend who is a vehicle dynamics engineer for GM, i may be able to get some. I'm making my observation based of walking through a salvage auction and noticing broken seat back after broken seat back in what appear to be minor rear end collisions. Also a lot of new seats have "polymer" frames. I'm also reasonably sure that the OEM's don't crash test above highway speeds at the most. I understand where you are coming from, and i may have made an assumption based on observation only. I retract the statement that they are "designed" to fail, and replace it with they "appear to be designed to fail, based on my own observations".