Date:         Fri, 8 Apr 1994 08:58:31 -0600 (CDT)
Sender:       Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@vanagon.com>
From:         dunham@mpd.tandem.com (Jerry Dunham)
Subject:      Re: Crashworthiness of Vanagons?

]On Thu, 7 Apr 1994, Joel Walker wrote:
]
]> if you are really worried about this, go find a junkyard with vanagons.
]> look at the wrecks. THAT's where you get to really see what happens to
[> cars and which ones protect their occupants.  vanagons seem to all be
]> rollovers or side-impacts, right behind the drivers. one rear-ender.
]
]Yeah, I just saw a bus (looked about '76, but what do I know) in the junk 
]yard.  It looked like it slid on the drivers side a bit.  And then the 
]rear roof section was caved in.  I don't know what they did, but there 
]wasn't any blood in the cabin. :)

A decade ago I had an accident with my '76 bus.  Both vehicles were going
about 40 mph and the impact was about 45 degrees off of a head on.  It took
out the whole fight front quarter of the Camaro, but the driver was belted
in and received no injuries.  The left headlight was wiped off of my bus,
and the driver's door was sprung enough so that, while it would latch, rain
would leak in at the top.  Looking at the two vehicles, it was hard to ima-
gine that they'd been in the same accident.  I bumped my head on the roof
right above the door frame and was a little sore, but didn't even have any
bruises.

I think the insurance company totalled the Camaro.  My bus took a few hun-
dred dollars to have repaired.  I've felt better about the crash perfor-
mance of VW buses ever since.

Later, my wife tried to dodge a deer in the same bus in the middle of the
night in a construction zone, looped it, went off the road sideways (while
facing from whence she'd come) where there was a six-foot dropoff, rolled
it in the air, landed on the roof, completed the rest of the roll back onto
the wheels, got out, and walked to a phone to call me (after midnight - she
was on her way home from work).  The bus would have been driveable except 
that the battery came adrift when it landed and was in another part of the
engine compartment altogether, not connected.  This time the insurance com-
pany totalled it.  (It was ten years old and had over 110,000 miles on it.)
My wife hit her head in the same place I'd hit in the earlier accident and
had a headache the next day.  Oh...and yes, she did miss the deer.

I'm sure it would be bad judgement to pick on a Kenworth for a headon, but
on the whole I don't think VW buses are an unsafe place from which to view
the American traffic scene.

-- 
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Jerry Dunham, MSE          hoosier@rider.cactus.org           (512)244-8598
Tandem Computers, Inc.                                dunham@mpd.tandem.com
Integrity Systems Division                          dunham_jerry@tandem.com

  "A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one-and-a-half times his
   own weight in other people's patience."

			        - J. Updike