Ethical issues in engineering design - 3TU.Centre for Ethics and ...

DutchEVO, safe or sustainable?
Often the heavy car is also very stiff and will deform less than the small lighter
car. The heavy car uses the deformation zone of the lighter smaller car. This
damages the lighter car even more and increases the chances of injury and death
in the lighter car. If the heavier car is an MPV (Multiple Purpose vehicle) or SUV
(Sports Utility Vehicle) then most of the times it also has a large ground
clearance. The stiff load bearing structure is higher above the ground than the
load bearing structure of the smaller car. Therefore the heavy car will crash
above the load bearing structure of the smaller car, for example it will crash into
the door instead of into the floor in a side impact. This further diminishes the
chance of the occupants of surviving the crash in the smaller, lighter car. A way
to make such a light car safer in crashes is to change the design in such a way
that heavy cars will crash into the load-bearing structure. This is called crash
compatibility. In view of the foregoing it was decided that the floor of the
DutchEVO will be higher, so that, in event of a crash, incoming cars will crash
into the load-bearing floor.
Including more and more passive safety systems (belts, airbags) would
according to the design team, also enhance the feeling of safety and would
therefore lead to an overestimation of the driver’s and car’s capabilities.
Therefore the team wanted to evaluate critically all existing passive safety
systems and did not want to include all of them. In the design team there was a
difference of opinion about what to include and what not, especially regarding
airbags. Inclusion of airbags adds mass. One of the discussions on airbags can
be found in the introduction of this chapter. In this quote it can be seen that for
some team members the lightweight criterion was more important. So in a
trade-off between safety and lightweight, the mass of a system was decisive for
them. Dave, in contrast, did not want to make a decision about the inclusion of
passive safety system based on the mass of the system. He wanted to make that
decision based on the efficacy of the system for preventing deaths and injuries.
4.3.3 Partner protection
Protection of other people on the roads is often called partner protection. The
protection of other road users has recently begun to gain more attention from
governmental organisations and the car industry. Recently EuroNCAP started
testing new car models in pedestrian impact situations. Most cars do not score
well in these tests; they score 1 or 2 stars where 4 is the maximum number of
stars that can be scored. There are at this moment only few car models that score
3 stars for the new pedestrian impact tests. 7 Some roadsters and large off-road
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7 Information from EuroNCAP accessed 15 Jan 2004 [www.euroncap.com, 2004]. The tests for
pedestrian impact were changed 1 Jan 2002. The scores for the old test are according to Euro-
NCAP incomparable to scores for the new tests.
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