Comments

• Simon said:
  

  ESC is standard on the Swedish market. Except on MY03, I think.

  -February 18th, 2008 at 10:33 pm
• lance said:
  

  Thats not fair!

  The old Folksam reprots did not red star the 99. So why now?

  Answer: The 99 is an 30 year + old car. In ANY modern safety analysis it will be being judged in crashes against much more modern cars with better safety.

  And frankly the 99 was ahead of its time that it has taken years for it to be judged as less safe compared with a modern norm.

  The 99 won the Don safety trophy and as we all know from seeing the photo in the book - Saab 99 and 900 The complete Story, it offered unheralded rollover protection on its launch in 1967.

  No other car of the 1960s or early 1070s offred such roll over protection in the posts.

  Folksham seem guilty of carrying out an analysis that is random and lacking in weighting for age+desigg+ size+corrosion issues in old cars+lack of airbags.

  So its not a controll3d trial is it!

  All I know is that if I was faced with a head on crash in a 99 or a Honda Civic , from the same era and even 20 years later, I would choose the 99 - as I would over a Citroen BX, a Fiat Tipo, A Ford Escort, or a Renault 5.

  Old versus new still aint far!

  -February 18th, 2008 at 10:43 pm
• Mike C said:
  

  I knew prior to clicking on the one comment who it was going to be posting. Nice read Lance. As I continue to say, you can’t beat the Saab safety…

  -February 19th, 2008 at 12:23 am
• Arild said:
  

  It puzzles me that Folksam hasn’t rated the Saab 9-3 Sportsedan. I believe it would be a contender for first place. It was introduced the same year as the Toyoto Avensis and they sell lot’s of 9-3s in Sweden, so there should be enough cars on the market to give them a rating. But could it be that the active safety is so good that they are seldom involved in a crash? And therefore Folksam can’t get a representative sample?

  -February 19th, 2008 at 12:37 am
• jev said:
  

  Hmm… coincidance or not, the Dutch newspaper “Het Algemeen Dagblad” published an article last week about the history of EuroNCAP (source: http://www.ad.nl/economie/article2050431.ece). They talk about the results of the crashtest… 3rd from the bottom of the list (unsafest) is the SAAB 900 from 1997…

  -February 19th, 2008 at 4:18 am
• Mike T said:
  

  I do not believe a safety survey such as this should be weighted. That is the problem with Euro NCAP. People think a particular 5 star car is as safe as any other 5 star car, but this is not the case. The star ratings are comparable only for cars in the same size class. That being said I would largely agree with Lance’s comments on the SAAB 99. However, it should be noted that the Volvo 244 also dates from the early 70s (and developed from a 60s design) and that did rather well! And as for roll-over strength in contemporary designs it would seem that the Volvo XC90 probably has claim to the state of the art. I doubt any Epsilon based SAAB will be any better than the average car in this respect. Or can someone at SAAB advise differently?

  -February 19th, 2008 at 5:46 am
• eggsngrits (Author) said:
  

  Lance:

  My thoughts exactly. In the ensuing 30 years cars on the whole are much better.

  I’ll also guess that the recent crashes may include an increasing number of ill-maintained vehicles to boot.

  -February 19th, 2008 at 6:02 am
• lance said:
  

  Eggs - exactly - but it took nearly 30 years for Folksam to red flag the 99!

  Mike T - yes to Volvo XC 90 has the strongest roof of any car onthe market- it exceeds the US rollover rule 56 requirements many, many times over.

  Readers may care to know that the US car makers managed to get the US authorities to hold roof strength rules static for years- so static -that the blue oval allegedly reduced the crush strength on the Explorer as they revised it over the years. This was all published in the US after several court cases.

  US SUV roof strength rule ask for about a x1.2 weight to crush resistance. The Volvo goes so far beyond that…its embarrasssing for US car makers.

  And, a 1967 Saab 99 dropped from over 10 feet up, on to it’s roof, suffers NO collapse of the A posts and the roof stays up. But a late 1990s SUV built in America suffered a total roof pillar collapse when dropped on its roof from under 3 feet!

  I can post the facts on the US stuff here if you want me to.

  -February 19th, 2008 at 6:27 am
• Mag-X said:
  

  Sure, the 99 doesn’t fare well against newer Saabs, but what about all the mid-90s Civics I pass on the way to work. I bet if I ran into one of those with my 99 it would fold up like soda can.

  -February 19th, 2008 at 6:44 am
• Mike C said:
  

  I knew I put my wife and kids in the XC 90 for some reason…

  -February 19th, 2008 at 12:38 pm
• lance said:
  

  Mag X .

  You would rather be in a 99 than a old Civic- really you would. If you do nto believe me- go visit 10 or 20 offset frontal crashed Civics and Accords. You wills ee a familair and repeated pattern of structural failure most coomonly - pushe dup A posts, hinged dashboard, collpased footwells and a distorted cabin windscreen shape.

  The China made ‘Brilliance’ crash test of 2007 copies this format to perfection.

  Mid 90s Civics along with late 80s to early 90s Accords, have massive windscreen apetures- which reach down to lower leg height when you are sat in them, long thin A posts , a very low scuttle firewall- with no box section in the firewall, a low toe-board, no inner wing crush cans and no transverse beam across the car under the dash and not triangualr fillets at the rear of teh wheel arch. So in an impact of as little as 30 mph the single skin firewall rides back, the floor pan hinges up, the pedals pivot back by over 2 feet, the steering wheel goes horizontal as its mounting point pivots, the airbag then is rendered near useles as it blasts up into the windscreen, Oh and the A posts pop up as the roof hinges at the B post weld joint. Oh adn the doors pop out and the side impact beams override the frames-no teh door apeture collapses too.

  It is - or was a Honda family trait across their range- until they decided tobuild safer cars and copied Volvos’ safety centre….

  All of which is why these older cars are allegedly responsible for high rates of paraplegic outcomes or death from footwell intrusion and chest injury.

  Go study these cars as wrecks and ask any top European safety engineer to confirm the story.

  -February 19th, 2008 at 11:41 pm
• Mike T said:
  

  Lance - I would be interested to see any of the US data you have available. The issue of the XC90/Explorer roof crush strength is interesting, particularly in its implications for both Volvo and SAAB (and any other specialist manufacturer that finds itself under the control of one of the majors). Volvo’s claims for the XC90 roof strength was very embarrasing to the Blue Oval and I think I am right in saying that it resulted in Volvo being forced to pull any references to roof strength from its advertising. The question this begs is that if the Blue Oval is not keen on its subsidiary to advertise its safety, is it also likely to require that future products are engineered down to the level of safety achieved by the parent’s products, so as to avoid potential embarrassment/litigation? It will be very interesting to see how the new XC60 fares. It should be remembered that XC90 is built on a variation of the old S80 platform and was engineered before Ford took control. This is also very relevant to SAAB (probably even more so as SAAB probably has less control over its engineering than does Volvo). If you are wondering why safety is no longer a core value for SAAB it is because it will be very difficult to make any particular advance in this area (particularly passive safety) when you are using an identikit platform to everyone else in the group (rember Epsillon 2 will be much more tightly controled in its variances than was previously the case). So I confidently predict that the next 9-3/9-5 will have exactly the same crash worthiness/ratings, roof crush strength, etc as any Opel/Chevrolet/whatever built on this platform.

  -February 20th, 2008 at 8:47 pm

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