Thread: Your 4WD and its crash protection

Interesting point.

Have a look in the video at 2:45 - the dual airbag set up is clearly visible yet neither airbag has inflated during a 40mph offset frontal collision...

depending on what you hit and how you hit it....

something small hitting a full size 4x4 thats stationary or at low speed will loose.

normal cars (and the new single piece 4x4's) offer better passanger protection but they sacrafice some of the rigidity of a traditional 4x4....

hit a roo big enough and hard enough in an new 4x4 and you can write it off but with the old steel barwork bolted to the chassis of the 2t 4x4 the roo usually looses and at worse you get a nasty jolt.

I think the only thing that makes my non airbag disco 1 safer than my 2002 falcon is it has better vissability so would hope to avoid an accident.
cheers
blaze

I have a D1 I bought damaged the other day. It has the RH chassis rail pushed back into the drivers floor pan, the bumper corner is where the battery is usually located. It hit a concrete dividing wall and then rolled on it's left side.
The airbags didn't deploy, and Rovacom tells me the system is operational and no faults recorded.
The owner/ driver was un injured, but was fortunate to be wearing a seatbelt.
Much as I love these vehicles, they are WAAYYY behind in crash safety compared to Later Rangies (L322 and RRS etc) and the D3, let alone almost all european cars from about 2002 on.
As Bblaze says, avoidance is your best chance

JC

I am comfortable with the measures deployed in the Disco 2 for both driver and passenger but in the Stage 1? I know who would be worse off and I drive it accordingly and at some point (when I can afford it and have learned how to weld properly) I fully intend to put rock sliders on it that can double as side intrusion bars - can't do much about the front end.

And rather than worrying about roos here, the big concern at night is sheep and cattle on country roads. Cows can make a big mess of anything that hit them.

Alan

Not surprising really as the D1's were designed well before that,,

Height is your friend.

in both senses,,
anything other than another 4wd or commercial vehicle and most of the hit will happen below my hip height,
being able to see well in advance is the biggest help.

I've had an offset head-on at 60kph in a SIII (stationary car rammed into the path of an oncoming Land Rover with about a car length of space to try to stop - going down hill), and while I could see the car flex & buckle in slow motion around me, it kept me safe and I wasn't thrown about at all. I did get a cargo barrier after that though (and another SIII,as the chassis was bent).

21 years later... I've been side swiped at about 50kph by the bullbar of a Land Cruiser while driving a Defender (blind corner, single lane gravel). I believe the steel side steps deflected the glancing blow and the only damage was to the door skins and B-Pillar. Without the side steps, I don't think the Defender would have any Side Impact Protection, but the steps are a lot more substantial than any SIPS system.

As well as crash survivability, one must consider crash avoidance.
The Defender has :

• Constant 4WD for better traction
• Massive Brakes.
• Large wheels - which means that holes and bumps on the road are comparitevly smaller than they'd be with smaller wheels, thus less likely to throw the vehicle off course. Imagine running over a pebble with a skateboard, and then a wheel barrow - the smaller wheel gets thrown off course.
• Improved visiblity and thus earlier hazard identification
• Increased Visual Precence (more likely to be seen)
• Suspension Stability - by this I mean, speed and curves don't throw them off course as easily. The one time I managed to get the SIII to 140kph (5 speed at the time, and in the NT) over slightly twisting undulating terrain, the vehicles stability was fine. I did slow down as I only had drum brakes. But you'll notice that in a Land Rover you can accelerate around a bend when other cars are riding their brakes.

This just looks at the agricultural vehicles in the Land Rover range. Compare that to the safety features in the Range Rover or Discovery, and why would you put your kids in a regular car.

If driving a 4wd is dangerous riding a motorcycle must be really dicing with death. There are risks associated with everything we do and they must be weighed up. To infer that you are puting your family at risk by driving a 4wd on a forum devoted to them is bordering on trolling.
I would rather my family was riding in my Disco 3 with its sophisticated active safety systems than the Mitsubishi 380 that I am driving at the moment with two airbags and lots of torque steer.
The dramatic photos of crash testing that usually accompany anti 4wd propaganda are the result of propelling a 4wd into a solid object, this is rarely the case in the real world. Measurements of the survivability of these sort of head on collisions usually have a difference of 20KM/H between the best and worst performers in the tests. The increase in risk by driving a poorly performing 4wd is more than outweighed by the weight advantage of hitting something smaller than yourself and the inertia generated by driving a vehicle that weighs 3 tons instead of one weighing 1200 Kg.
So my assessment of the risk of having my family in a 4wd is summed up in the following manner:
The chance of hitting an object in the real world that conforms to a crash testing model are fairly small.
The chances of hitting an object smaller than my own vehicle and my mass being the determining factor in my decelleration speed are greater than average
Other often quoted risk factors such as increased height contributing to a greater chance of rollover are easily mitigated by the adoption of driving habits consistant with the vehicles design.
So to the original question, yes I do feel safer in a 4wd than in a normal car.

Some interesting stuff on how representative crash tesets are of real world collisions: Desktop Engineering - Car-crash Testing: Is It Accurate?

Regards,
Tote