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      08-15-2014, 05:50 PM   #18
chrisny
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Quote:
Originally Posted by bradleyland
Quote:
Originally Posted by Diver View Post
It appears this has the potential to add an order of magnitude of difficulty to extracting people from badly damaged cars.
That has been true ever since car safety became a priority in the 80s. Every time they make cars safer, they become harder to extract victims from. The up side is that occupants are safer to begin with. Optimizing for occupant extraction is solving the problem from the wrong end.

Quote:
Originally Posted by chrisny View Post
+1. A bit alarming that they need special training for this car. How long until every local, volunteer fire department has this training... Seems like a big risk to me.
But what is the alternative? Not make cars safer? Not reduce CO2 emissions? Everyone's job changes as technology advances. Is it alarming that office workers now need to know how to use a computer? This is their job. The whole "volunteer fire department" thing is an edge case. The vast majority of people live in regions with paid emergency services. On the whole, you are safer because of these technologies.
Ignoring the dramatic nature of your response (computers, really?), I don't think you are correct assuming the majority of the world resides in larger cities with paid emergency services. Quite the opposite, I would imagine. I live in the suburbs of New York City where my real estate taxes are quite high. Our emergency services are plentiful, and they are volunteers.

My point was not that cars should never change, never said nor implied such a thing. My point was simply that I have no desire to be in one of these cars until the responders have been properly trained, to the extent that one can safely assume anywhere they are, they'll be in good hands in the event of an accident. I say this is alarming because it is, and it's something I hadn't considered before reading this thread. If you want to compare it to use of computers in an office, I would ask you, how many people have been trapped inside of a burning computer with firemen that didn't know how to get them out? Sorry, guess I didn't ignore the absurd comparison after all.
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