The Crash Of 97

It was just about seven in the morning on that Sunday and my TV set was beginning to warm up. The good newspaper man that I am, I watch the late night news, and invariably its the ripe voice of the BBC news announcer that echoes in my living room in the mornings.

The first pictures were hazy shots of a mangled automobile, and then my eyes caught the caption: Princess Diana suffers serious injuries in a high speed car crash in Paris. The car was still in the subway, and this was a live telecast. I could tell from the cars almost intact rear end that it was an S-class Mercedes. The motoring scribe in me was soon comforting my shell shocked wife as I reassured her that it was one of the safest cars on earth and also one of the finest ever built.

 

That blunt caption gave way to the devastating news that the Princess of Wales had succumbed to her injuries at the Paris hospital. Even the safest car that money could buy couldnt save the life of Princess Diana. Soon there were confirmations from Buckingham Palace and the secretary of state. The ensuing debate on the screen blamed the paparazzi hounding the Princess and her boyfriend for the high speed chase and then the crash. In one of the repeated telecasts, the newscaster also said that it was difficult to imagine anyone walking out of the wreck that the Mercedes was after the crash.

But even through the Sunday morning grief, I had to differ the more mangled the car looked, the more the front end telescoped and caved in, the more there was a chance of people walking out of that car. The S class Mercedes Benz is an engineered car, and it didnt take a bushel of gold from them to make me say that. Anyone who knows his cars can attest to one fact they are engineered first for safety and then for mobility.

The crumple zones of any modern-day car (not necessarily the Mercedes) are designed to absorb the impact and safeguard the passenger shell. So a car that looks mutilated beyond recognition after the crash still has a better chance of saving its passengers than a car that went side on, or rolled over or, worse, side-overlapped into oncoming traffic. Provided the passengers were wearing seat belts and that the car had the necessary passive safety features such as the supplementary restraining systems (airbags).

The newscaster was soon to be proved wrong, when it became known that Trevor Rees-Jones, the bodyguard who was sitting in the passenger seat in the front row had survived the crash! Unfortunately, fate had decreed that even though a passenger in the front had survived, the very famous passenger and her companion in the back seat had to bow to an untimely guest death.

As investigations proceed, more has been unearthed. The car was being driven by a bodyguard-driver and not a regular chauffeur nothing wrong with that, since these are cars that can make wonderful drivers out of ordinary mortals. For me, the bombshell was the disclosure that the driver had consumed the equivalent of something like a bottle and half of red wine.

The picture becomes clearer a two-tonne plus automobile, speeds in the range of 150 kph and higher, a driver who wasnt familiar with the car, and paparazzi swarming the car in underpowered scooterettes and small motorcycles (from the TV pictures of seized two wheelers, it was clear that the puny machines just could not match the speeds that a 6000CC V-12 Mercedes could, and Im waiting to find out how they managed to keep pace).

All these points are indicators of how one could have prevented the accident from happening at all. But there are other things, like a strip of asphalt that plunges down into a tunnel, quite capable of unsettling almost any driver and any car if he or she is not a regular. Theres also the question of why a city like Paris still sports partially-lit tunnels which can cause momentary blindness if you are entering the road from a brightly lit road and why the tunnels had naked concrete supports instead of having them covered with impact-absorbing substances like an Amco barriers.

There are many lessons that everyone from town planners to every day drivers like you and me could learn from this well-publicized tragedy. But now let us take a look at the most important factor of them all what chance do people have of surviving a car crash?

In motoring parlance, safety is classified into active and passive safety features. In simple terms, active safety is the kind of engineering wizardry that works relentlessly to prevent an accident from happening, and passive safety is what is supposed to safeguard passengers if the car is involved in a accident. Almost every car company now takes into account innumerable accident combinations, and crash test their car either physically or simulate the conditions on computers to engineer safer automobiles. And some, such as Mercedes Benz and BMW, have far exceeded the stipulated front-and-side impact regulations that they are supposed to adhere to as European car manufacturers. Test mules are thrown around to test the rigidity of the passenger shell, crashed head on to concrete barriers, banged with concrete blocks on the profiles, rear-ended to simulate a multiple accident scene and much more.

On an average, 200 cars are crashed beyond recognition before an all-new automobile reaches the launch stage and show rooms. To its credit, Mercedes Benz has never even attempted to patent some of its inventions, such as the restraining systems (seat belts), airbags and anti-lock breaking systems that have saved so many lives in the past three or four decades.

But despite every precaution you might take, there are combinations of elements that lead to an accident and finally results in passenger fatality. Had there been no chase, had the car been traveling within stipulated city velocities, had the driver been not drunk, had he been familiar with the car, the princess would have been still around even if the car involved was of any other make. The sad part is that all these unlikely threads came together, and the car dubbed the best engineered car in the world by Autocrat and Motor couldnt cope with all that.

Now let us get back to the person who survived the crash the bodyguard. He was in the front passenger seat, where the 1994 specification S class Mercedes Benz has an air-bag protection. It is increasingly becoming evident that this air-bag saved his life. We should note that air-bags are of use only if the primary restraining system or the seat belt is worn, which is why its called the SRS or supplementary restraining system Mercedes goes to the length of engraving initials RS in the seat belt mounts to remind the passengers that the airbag is only a SRS!

Had the car sported the rear passenger supplementary-restraining system, which the S class cars will earn in the next summer, the chances of passengers in the rear surviving the crash would have been higher. The driver who perished on the spot had protection in the form of a circular airbag fitted on to the steering wheel, which in all probability inflated at the point of first impact but collapsed in the next few seconds along with another safety feature, the `collapsible steering wheel (as reported by Le Monde the day after the crash). It was the multiple impacts that led to his death since the steering mounting and the protruding facia were too much for a collapsing airbag (yet another safety feature, to prevent the accident victim from getting suffocated by the inflated bag) to counter.

Comparatively speaking, the passenger side of the front seat can be considered safer, since the bigger, squarer airbag that covers more area, gets a real chance of saving the victim in the case of multiple impact accidents.

Last Saturday, the United Kingdom and the world mourned the passing of the peoples princess. For Mercedes-Benz, too, this marks a time of mourning. They built a car thats used by the maximum number of head of states as their preferred mode of transportation, and applauded by the people who know as the finest automobile that man has ever created. It took a completely unforeseen, and highly tragic, sequence of events to mark the first time the Mercedes S Class could not live up to its reputation. We can only take comfort from the fact that Dianas memory will outlive you and me.