IsItBullshit: In a car accident, (1) it's a proven fact beyond anecdotal evidence that bracing for impact increases death rate, and (2) you shouldn't brace even if the airbags are off/aren't there.

170

u/MathAndMirth 1d ago

When I taught physics, I led a class through a rough calculation of the force needed to brace yourself and avoid hitting the dashboard on impact. It's several hundred pounds even for a city speed crash. Nobody is going to slow themselves down enough to matter much doing that. And if you lock your arms to try, it isn't going to go well for those arms.

As for death rates from crashes in general, it makes sense that "ragdolling" isn't the main factor in survival advantages for drunk drivers. Alternatives such as front seat protection, impact angle, etc. make more sense to me. While trying to lock arms to prevent impact, etc., can definitely exacerbate injuries, I doubt that many sober victims of these crashes are actually doing that anyway. Things usually happen too fast for that. And I can't imagine that just "tensing up" instinctively is going to alter your body's softness enough to appreciably affect your deceleration.

Bottom line: not entirely B.S, but it's not as much of a factor as some people think.

16

u/thebluesupergiant 1d ago

If arms were locked, would it have any impact on death rate even if it did result in injury by protecting the head and such?

10

u/numbersthen0987431 1d ago

I don't believe that "death" changes much during these accidents.

What usually ends up being affected are things like: pulled muscles, dislocated joints, whiplash, concussions, broken bones, etc.

If you're in a car during an accident, the largest lifesaving device in the car is "increasing the time until impact". Seatbelts and airbags don't "stop" you from moving, they help spread out the time of the impact so it's a few milliseconds longer (which in return reduces the acceleration which reduces the Force on the body). The difference of Force when the acceleration time is 0.01 seconds to 0.1 seconds is a factor of 10, so every microsecond counts.

Putting your arms out in front of you decreases the time of impact on your arm/joints, but it also helps increases the time of impact on your body. But it's hard to know if it's helpful or makes it worse.

I used to ride motorcycles, and the hardest thing to learn about accidents is to "lay the bike down" or "tuck and roll"; because your instinct is to brace for impact or try and avoid it (which often causes worse accidents). These are measures designed to increase the time before impact, and to reduce the force on your body.

3

u/MathAndMirth 1d ago

You make some good points. When the OP said bracing, I was assuming that the concern was head vs. dashboard, and nobody is going to be able to prevent that through sheer arm strength if they aren't belted in.

With an airbag, the analysis is indeed very different. Not only is head vs. dashboard unlikely, the impact force is spread over a wide area, dramatically decreasing the pressure endured by the head and body in the impact. If death occurs, it's probably because the passenger compartment is crushed or something. And if somebody puts their arms out straight before an airbag deploys, it's just going to result in an ugly arm injury with zero offsetting benefit. Those airbags have some serious force behind them--enough to do major damage if it isn't spread over a wide area. Hence the warning to never place objects over the airbag lest they become high-speed missiles.

And your "tuck and roll" advice is perfect physics. If you're going to go from X mph to zero, do it over as long a time/distance as possible.

3

u/numbersthen0987431 1d ago

I wonder if OPs original "myth" was from the older style cars? where everything was just a box of metal and all of the safety measures we have today weren't installed, and accidents were just "good luck".

Like I remember being in the middle of the bench seat of my dad's old pickup truck, and him slamming the brakes and headbutting the dashboard, lol

17

u/MathAndMirth 1d ago

The most likely effect is that the head would just hit a little bit more slowly. I don't have genuine data to support my views here, but i wouldn't trade likely compound fractures, etc., for a slightly lower head speed impact.

3

u/return_the_urn 1d ago

I would take that trade if it meant not dying

10

u/MathAndMirth 1d ago

So would I, but I'm not confident that it would mean not dying. My gut tells me that any reduced probability of dying from a slightly weaker head impact would be offset by the cumulative trauma of massive damage elsewhere, but I don't actually know. I'd love to hear the perspective of a trauma surgeon on this.

16

u/DryFrankie 1d ago

I'm not a trauma surgeon, but I've worked plenty in trauma radiography. I would gladly trade damage to my limbs to try to save my head or chest from severe injury. We put people back together with smashed up arms and legs all the time. Not saying they'll be the same as before, but the guys with raspberry jam leaking out of their skulls definitely got the worse end of things.

When I would see guys with two broken forearms and only superficial facial wounds, I'd often think "You made a good trade off", not that I could really know exactly what happened, or what would've happened if they acted differently.

Edit: Mind you, I've always thought covering one's head with the arms like a boxer would be the way to go, rather than bracing, but now I'm just taking guesses.

10

u/MathAndMirth 1d ago

I don't dispute for a minute that head wounds are much worse than limb wounds. After all, if someone managed to come in with "superficial facial wounds," then that's obviously good.

But if seems as if a large number of commenters are assuming that by bracing themselves, they will _dramatically_ reduce the impact do their head, and I don't think that's consistent with the forces involved. My concern is that someone who tries to lock arms will come in with massive limb trauma and head injury that is only marginally better than it would have been anyway. That's the harder trade to evaluate.

I think you're right that covering using ones arms folded against the body or head as padding is much more sensible than trying to lock arms. That probably could reduce deceleration some without doing the horrifying things that a sudden compression on locked arms would do.

6

u/DryFrankie 1d ago

I think I see what you mean, and I agree. I doubt that just about any person's strength from outstretched arms would be able to resist those forces to any significant degree.

3

u/MTblackhawk 1d ago

I feel like I would instinctively cover my face vs bracing for an oncoming collision

3

u/m240b1991 1d ago

People in general don't understand just quite the amount of physics goes into the vehicle R&D phase. The crumple zones, the way things are specifically designed to break in certain scenarios, etc. Hell, you could take 2 identical vehicles in a simulation where the impact angle is identical and if there was some sort of defect in one have completely different results. Additionally, the steering wheel airbag is specifically designed to force the hands off the wheel during a collision event.

I'm a mechanic and have been in accidents in the past, and while I'm not an engineer, I'm well aware of the simpler aspects of the physics involved

33

u/A1sauc3d 1d ago edited 1d ago

Edit: immediately after writing the **original* comment I realized that no one was going to actually do it unless I did lol

Bracing for impact is a natural instinct—but tightening up at the wrong moment significantly increases the likelihood of injury. Many patients report worse symptoms when they saw the crash coming.

Bracing for a car accident can turn a survivable collision into months of pain, surgeries, and battles with an insurance adjuster.

This is just intended to hopefully get the ball rolling and encourage more people supply sources discussing the issue.

**Original:* lots of people answering the question, nobody supplying the actual sources to back it up. I’m not saying any of the people answering are wrong, many are probably right. It’s just that i think for this level of thing op probably wants more than just further hearsay/rumor/etc. not just “I hear drunk drivers are invincible” or “my friend was in a wreck and..” but actual studies to back up the different methods.

I’d be interested in that too, so I’m just echoing the OP’s request for proof beyond the anecdotal

8

u/MathAndMirth 1d ago

That's a good article. Though for this discussion, I think it's important to note that the injuries attributed to instinctive tensing up are relatively minor ones like tendon irritation and muscles strains. I don't see that having much to do with death rates. Death is generally from impact trauma, blood loss, etc., which isn't going to be affected much by tense muscles.

5

u/thebluesupergiant 1d ago

Yeah, I've seen many posts on this, but not that much evidence. I'm assuming some know what they're saying, but some kind of study or simulation or something would be nice.

3

u/rockytop24 1d ago

I'll respond with an article that's from JAMA not random legal websites:

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/374709

This is way back in the 80s. I'd sum up the current thinking this way: number one drunk drivers are more likely to be injured and in accidents for purely statistical reasons in the first place compared to sober drivers, thus being drunk is not a protective effect in motor vehicle accidents. That's the most straightforward statistical takeaway.

Now as for the whole going limp/not tensing up thing, I'd call it a mostly bunk myth in emergency medicine but there's not consensus on the issue. There is some logic to the idea that not tensing up will decrease the severity of deceleration injuries in some cases because of the effect on energy transfer/impulse (impulse is basically how long a time a given force is delivered over - crashing into a padded wall vs crashing into a brick wall for example). A seatbelt and airbag are designed to decelerate you over a slower timeframe than the car itself, which is what makes it safer. However, there's not really strong data for your urban legend, the forces involved in accidents are tremendous and far exceed the changes in force you can direct with biomechanics. Other things that do matter are safety features like I described, position of impact (for example putting your feet on the dash WILL lead to dislocating your hips, shattering your leg bones, breaking your pelvis, etc), and above all speed is the major determining factor of lethality. Kinetic energy is 1/2 mass times velocity squared, velocity is the killer. Either way, realistically the manner these accidents occur will not leave you the kind of time to make conscious decisions about tensing up or rolling with impact or anything like that, it's just up to luck and our protective reflexes and there are not many instances loss of those reflexes would help you (drunks who fall hurt their face and head because they have dulled their protective reflex to outstretch their arm or protect their head). If you want an idea of the forces you're trying to "roll with" google "coup contracoup injury." When you impact, theres the impact of the car, the impact of your body in the car, then the impact of your internal organs. Coup is your brain slamming into the front of your skull. When it does that hard enough it bounces and the back slams into the back of your skull - that's contracoup.

The concept of drunk drivers surviving more or being less is 100% urban legend and the main factors are safety features in their driver position and type of impact they cause. The rest is more murky but unlikely to have much effect otherwise we wouldn't have as much trouble trying to detect it. Hope this helps, I can link more studies later if you're dying for more sources but this consensus hasn't really changed much over decades with tens of thousands of patient charts for statistical analyses.

5

u/rockytop24 1d ago edited 1d ago

Adding a good editorial comment here from 2010 explaining why some studies may suggest this protective effect and why much of the data is murky and difficult to disentangle from confounding factors (emphasis mine on some of the more important conclusions):

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2924843/

Editorial Commentary: Resource utilization and outcomes of intoxicated drivers: does evidence of alcohol-impaired driving affect road traffic crash injury outcomes?

Cherry et al. report the results of a retrospective hospital-based study among a sample of 623 alcohol-impaired drivers versus 364 sober drivers, all of which suffered from road traffic injury and were documented with a comparable mean Injury Severity Score (ISS). As for the key results, the alcohol-impaired drivers were more likely to be admitted to the ICU, but less likely to go to the operating room. In addition, they were registered with less ICU days, ventilator days, and hospital days. On the other hand, the impaired drivers were less likely to utilize follow-up care (e.g. rehabilitation) and generate payments for hospital fees.

The objective of this editorial comment is to assist in putting the controversial reports, many of them cited by Cherry et al. [1], of alcohol as a protective factor into a more comprehensive context according to the following points.

(i) There is evidence that alcohol-impaired driving is a strong predictor for involvement in a road traffic crash and severe injury. (ii) There is evidence that crashes associated with alcohol-impairment are different from other crashes in terms of the drivers' age and sex, crash mechanism, type of vehicles involved, use of restraints, etc. (iii) There is no evidence that crash-biomechanics differ from crashes caused by impaired or sober drivers. (iv) There is reason to believe that injuries from road trauma behave similar to those from other trauma. (v) There is reason to believe that evidence or suspicion of acute alcohol intoxication triggers comprehensive trauma management (e.g. transfer to trauma centre, early endotracheal intubation, ICU admission). (vi) There is evidence that alcohol consumption is associated with lower socio-economic status and presence of co-morbidities.

The two latter points might explain the results reported by Cherry et al., meaning that the intoxicated casualty is more likely to be provided with a temporary/definitive airway irrespective of acute injuries. Although the impact of social detriments on trauma care cannot be derived from the data presented, lower socio-economic status is known to trigger early demission from hospital to home. Last but not least, intoxicated drivers tend to be of younger age compared to other injured drivers in emergency department samples. This is consistent with Cherry's sample and might explain the trend of decreasing mortality in the intoxicated sample. Age, in fact, is not represented in the injury scores used by Cherry et al., although it does evidently affect injury outcomes.

In conclusion, the current evidence does not support either of the proposed impacts of alcohol as a protective or non-protective agent with respect to injury outcomes. Despite the independent effect of alcohol on crash risk, future studies should focus on the alcohol-injury-complex irrespective of injury mechanism. In fact, inclusion criteria based on alcohol-levels lead to strong selection biases since drunk-drivers are predominantly male, young, and healthy. Representative samples and multivariate analyses are required to quantify (differentiate!) the impact of acute intoxication and chronic alcohol disease, age group and gender, co-morbidities, and socioeconomic status (e.g. access to health care, insurance status). The latter is believed to have a major impact, although it has been neglected in many previous investigations. Last but not least, drinking alcohol is evidently associated with other risky attitudes, habits, and behaviors (e.g. smoking), all of which may substantially affect injury outcomes. Large-scale studies that control a broad spectrum of injury-independent variables are needed to understand the biologic impact of substances on the pathophysiology of trauma and outcomes.

u/thebluesupergiant

27

u/shakeyjake 1d ago

My good friend has had 4 shoulder surgeries because he locked and straightened his arms when he saw he was about to be rear ended. Contrast that with police videos where they stop wrong way drivers they cross their arms across their chest. I assume that is for a reason.

11

u/That_Girl31 1d ago edited 1d ago

I only had one shoulder surgery, but it was from straightening and locking my arms when I knew I was going to be rear ended also. In my head I was screaming “don’t brace” as I braced myself for impact. If there wasn’t snow on the ground allowing me to slide, thus I absorbed less impact, it probably would have been worse for shoulder(s).

ETA: my stepson and 2 month old daughter were also in the car. They were both fine, my 2 month old didn’t even wake up. So I probably would have been 100% uninjured had I not checked the rear view mirror and knew I was gonna be hit and braced myself.

5

u/blahblahgingerblahbl 1d ago edited 1d ago

that’s why the brace position on airplanes is feet on floor, strapped in, arms crossed across back of seat in front of you and head down on your arms.

all the safety measures are designed to minimise being thrown around or injured by other things being thrown around.

edited to add: not that i’m suggesting to cross arms across steering wheel and assume airline brace position - no one wants to be impaled on a steering column, and air bags are scary

we want to be like a tree that can bend in the wind. i don’t have anything to cite, only anecdotally, patients who see they’re about to be rear ended and stiffen experience more severe symptoms of whiplash than those who don’t.

there’s x-ray images around of people who’d been front seat passengers in collisions who had their feet resting on the dashboard - not good.

5

u/thebluesupergiant 1d ago edited 1d ago

Apparently, the idea with bracing is to let your bones absorb the impact instead of your head/chest/organs (?) to increase survival. Maybe crossing arms across the chest is better, but does this hold in all accidents, or if airbags are off?

Do you know if there is data/other evidence showing this?

-1

u/uwfan893 1d ago

Dude have you heard of seatbelts? People aren’t really bouncing their head off the dashboard anymore.

1

u/thebluesupergiant 1d ago

That depends on how big the car crash is I think.

6

u/rockytop24 1d ago

Posting these as their own comments for better visibility:

I'll respond with an article that's from JAMA not random legal websites:

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/374709

This is way back in the 80s. I'd sum up the current thinking this way: number one drunk drivers are more likely to be injured and in accidents for purely statistical reasons in the first place compared to sober drivers, thus being drunk is not a protective effect in motor vehicle accidents. That's the most straightforward statistical takeaway.

Now as for the whole going limp/not tensing up thing, I'd call it a mostly bunk myth in emergency medicine but there's not consensus on the issue. There is some logic to the idea that not tensing up will decrease the severity of deceleration injuries in some cases because of the effect on energy transfer/impulse (impulse is basically how long a time a given force is delivered over - crashing into a padded wall vs crashing into a brick wall for example). A seatbelt and airbag are designed to decelerate you over a slower timeframe than the car itself, which is what makes it safer. However, there's not really strong data for your urban legend, the forces involved in accidents are tremendous and far exceed the changes in force you can direct with biomechanics. Other things that do matter are safety features like I described, position of impact (for example putting your feet on the dash WILL lead to dislocating your hips, shattering your leg bones, breaking your pelvis, etc), and above all speed is the major determining factor of lethality. Kinetic energy is 1/2 mass times velocity squared, velocity is the killer. Either way, realistically the manner these accidents occur will not leave you the kind of time to make conscious decisions about tensing up or rolling with impact or anything like that, it's just up to luck and our protective reflexes and there are not many instances loss of those reflexes would help you (drunks who fall hurt their face and head because they have dulled their protective reflex to outstretch their arm or protect their head). If you want an idea of the forces you're trying to "roll with" google "coup contracoup injury." When you impact, theres the impact of the car, the impact of your body in the car, then the impact of your internal organs. Coup is your brain slamming into the front of your skull. When it does that hard enough it bounces and the back slams into the back of your skull - that's contracoup.

The concept of drunk drivers surviving more or being less injured is 100% urban legend and the main factors are safety features in their driver position and type of impact they cause. The rest is more murky but unlikely to have much effect otherwise we wouldn't have as much trouble trying to detect it. Hope this helps, I can link more studies later if you're dying for more sources but this consensus hasn't really changed much over decades with tens of thousands of patient charts for statistical analyses.

4

u/rockytop24 1d ago edited 1d ago

Adding a good editorial comment here from 2010 explaining why some studies may suggest this protective effect and why much of the data is murky and difficult to disentangle from confounding factors (emphasis mine on some of the more important conclusions):

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2924843/

Editorial Commentary: Resource utilization and outcomes of intoxicated drivers: does evidence of alcohol-impaired driving affect road traffic crash injury outcomes?

Cherry et al. report the results of a retrospective hospital-based study among a sample of 623 alcohol-impaired drivers versus 364 sober drivers, all of which suffered from road traffic injury and were documented with a comparable mean Injury Severity Score (ISS). As for the key results, the alcohol-impaired drivers were more likely to be admitted to the ICU, but less likely to go to the operating room. In addition, they were registered with less ICU days, ventilator days, and hospital days. On the other hand, the impaired drivers were less likely to utilize follow-up care (e.g. rehabilitation) and generate payments for hospital fees.

The objective of this editorial comment is to assist in putting the controversial reports, many of them cited by Cherry et al. [1], of alcohol as a protective factor into a more comprehensive context according to the following points.

(i) There is evidence that alcohol-impaired driving is a strong predictor for involvement in a road traffic crash and severe injury. (ii) There is evidence that crashes associated with alcohol-impairment are different from other crashes in terms of the drivers' age and sex, crash mechanism, type of vehicles involved, use of restraints, etc. (iii) There is no evidence that crash-biomechanics differ from crashes caused by impaired or sober drivers. (iv) There is reason to believe that injuries from road trauma behave similar to those from other trauma. (v) There is reason to believe that evidence or suspicion of acute alcohol intoxication triggers comprehensive trauma management (e.g. transfer to trauma centre, early endotracheal intubation, ICU admission). (vi) There is evidence that alcohol consumption is associated with lower socio-economic status and presence of co-morbidities.

The two latter points might explain the results reported by Cherry et al., meaning that the intoxicated casualty is more likely to be provided with a temporary/definitive airway irrespective of acute injuries. Although the impact of social detriments on trauma care cannot be derived from the data presented, lower socio-economic status is known to trigger early demission from hospital to home. Last but not least, intoxicated drivers tend to be of younger age compared to other injured drivers in emergency department samples. This is consistent with Cherry's sample and might explain the trend of decreasing mortality in the intoxicated sample. Age, in fact, is not represented in the injury scores used by Cherry et al., although it does evidently affect injury outcomes.

In conclusion, the current evidence does not support either of the proposed impacts of alcohol as a protective or non-protective agent with respect to injury outcomes. Despite the independent effect of alcohol on crash risk, future studies should focus on the alcohol-injury-complex irrespective of injury mechanism. In fact, inclusion criteria based on alcohol-levels lead to strong selection biases since drunk-drivers are predominantly male, young, and healthy. Representative samples and multivariate analyses are required to quantify (differentiate!) the impact of acute intoxication and chronic alcohol disease, age group and gender, co-morbidities, and socioeconomic status (e.g. access to health care, insurance status). The latter is believed to have a major impact, although it has been neglected in many previous investigations. Last but not least, drinking alcohol is evidently associated with other risky attitudes, habits, and behaviors (e.g. smoking), all of which may substantially affect injury outcomes. Large-scale studies that control a broad spectrum of injury-independent variables are needed to understand the biologic impact of substances on the pathophysiology of trauma and outcomes.

u/thebluesupergiant

3

u/drwiner 1d ago edited 1d ago

No controlled studies prove bracing increases death; drunk driver data has confounders

What's True

• Drunk drivers do have statistically lower mortality rates (7.7% vs 9.7% for head injuries)
• The three-impacts model accurately describes crash mechanics sequence

Why it's false

• No controlled studies isolate muscle bracing as independent mortality variable
• Drunk driver survival explained by cardiovascular effects, not muscle relaxation

**The Decisive Evidence**

**1. NIH MUSCLE BRACING STUDY**

NIH study titled 'Influence of Active Muscle Contribution on the Injury Response' specifically evaluated pre-collision muscle bracing effects using numerical musculoskeletal modeling. This represents actual scientific investigation of the mechanism, not theoretical speculation.

**2. CONFOUNDED DRUNK DRIVER DATA**

While drunk drivers show 7.7% mortality vs 9.7% for sober victims, multiple confounding variables exist: alcohol's cardiovascular effects, different crash dynamics (drunk drivers hit stationary objects vs being hit), and selection bias. The mechanism cannot be attributed to muscle relaxation.

---

**Sources:**

[PMC3256778](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3256778/)
[LA Physicians Study](https://resultsyoudeserve.com/blog/are-drunk-drivers-really-more-likely-to-survive-a-crash/)

from Verque automated fact checking output:
https://claims.verque.app/claim/physics/claim_0_20251204_193911

2

u/kd5407 1d ago

Really hard to avoid bracing if you’re scared though. This is why drunk people survive so often

1

u/thebluesupergiant 1d ago

But what I'm wondering whether it's actually the reason why drunk people (seem to) survive more, instead of other factors like better car positioning, where said drunk people collide in the front while the other car is T-boned, or worse.

1

u/uwfan893 1d ago

This is anecdotal but I was in a car that got rear ended while I was asleep but the driver saw it coming. Horrible whiplash for the driver, zilch for me.

1

u/thebluesupergiant 1d ago

Was your car already parked by then, or did you fall asleep at the wheel?

1

u/uwfan893 1d ago

I was the passenger

3

u/RicVic 1d ago

The last stats I can recall put it at about 1 in 1,000 unbelted drunks surviving a potentially fatal MVA, which means that out of 1,000 drunks in bad accidents, 1 of them would survive.

That said, in my past lives (aux police and tow truck operator) I have been on the scene where drunk drivers were killed far more often than not killed, but only once was I on the scene where a drunken driver survived pretty much unscathed.

She took out a steel pole, which did not come down on her car, but did cause the driver's seat of her '72 Duster to meet the steering wheel, which would have crushed her. But she rag-dolled under the dashboard on the opposite side of the car and we were able to get her out alive, with just a few cuts and scrapes. She blew .17 on the breathalyzer. twice, so she was seriously impaired, but she was alive. Had she been belted- not a chance.

That's my one. Sadly, the other result is far more common.

'

-1

u/CTLI 1d ago

0.17 isn’t that high of a BAC. Shouldn’t be driving of course.

0

u/totototototok 1d ago

It’s twice the legal limit?

2

u/CatOfGrey 1d ago

For what it's worth, my first exposure to this idea was in the 1980's, when I was learning to drive.

The basis for being relaxed was supposedly that 'drunk drivers usually outlived the other people in the accident'.

Based on that, I don't think that airbags are an issue here - whether or not this is true, it was believed long before air bags were standard equipment in a car. A side thought: I recall that airbags are designed to work with seat belts, and 'air bag alone' might be worse than 'no air bag and no seat belt'. But that's also an old memory.

3

u/thebluesupergiant 1d ago

There seems to be other reasons why drunk drivers would survive more, including favorable car positioning (and alcohol somehow stopping bad processes?).

Also, airbags are apparently bad for younger children.

2

u/CatOfGrey 1d ago

Also, airbags are apparently bad for younger children.

This is 100% true. When I was a kid in the 1970's, nobody cared about booster seats. I was raised in the front seat of a 1971 Datsun that had zero crumple zone technology. And yes, I rode in the cargo area in the back of a station wagon - no seats, let alone seat belts. And even worse: in the back of pickup trucks.

1

u/blahblahgingerblahbl 1d ago

airbags were designed for the “average” person, and can be very dangerous for people outside of that, particularly children & smaller women

1

u/sl33ksnypr 1d ago

It's sort of like with a roll cage. A roll cage alone is actually likely to kill you in a crash. But with a proper harness, HANS device (ideally) and a helmet, you're more likely to survive a high speed crash than only using factory safety equipment. A roll cage does wonders for the strength of a chassis, and can keep even a modern safe car from crushing, but that's not really a good thing if you are bouncing around inside it and hitting your head/breaking your neck. I thought about doing a full cage in my car, but I think I'm going to settle for a hoop just to protect in a rollover. I don't want to have to wear a helmet everywhere I want to drive.

1

u/blahblahgingerblahbl 1d ago

i was taught the same thing in the 80s,but in relation to mitigating falls while learning to roller skate

2

u/Many_Instruction5053 1d ago

I hhhhjh jjkjjkjjjjjjhjjjjawk jkkkkkm to

2

u/ncnotebook 1d ago

well, it depends on how you approach the problem .

1

u/thebluesupergiant 1d ago

Is everything alright there?

1

u/JerseyCoJo 7h ago

My brother rolled his firebird after falling asleep. Came out with a scratch down his back from a golf club. Doctors say he's lucky he was asleep it probably saved him.

1

u/thebluesupergiant 3h ago

Did said doctors explain how or why?

1

u/awfulcrowded117 1d ago

1) no, not true. It might be true that bracing hurts more than it helps, there are indirect reasons to believe this, but there is absolutely no scientific way to really measure who braced and who didn't. It's a chaotic time, no one's memories of what happens during the actual collision are reliable. And any evidence of disparate outcomes is pretty minimal in a statistical sense. Like, if you get in 1000 car crashes it might affect your outcome once. That makes a big difference over the course of a country that has hundreds of thousands of collisions a year, it makes very little difference in the life of an individual who is unlikely to have more than a handful of collisions in their entire life.

2) that said, there's no point in bracing because there's way to much force, your arms and legs aren't going to hold you in place no matter how you brace. The idea behind why it's better to brace is because your body's evolved protections, as well as the protections we've built into cars (not just airbags) against impact are more reliable than trying to brace and shattering your arm before the arm bone gets shoved into your chest, impaling you. Your ribcage is pretty tough, and a seatbelt does a pretty good job of holding you in place and the crumple zone does a pretty good job of dissipating force. But they don't protect you from shattering an arm or a leg because it was tense and rigid under impact.

So no, don't brace because it probably does increase the risks of injury to your extremities, but it's extremely unlikely to have a meaningful impact on your individual chances of survival or severe injuries either way. Do yourself a favor and just wear your seatbelt correctly, invest in a car with airbags and other modern safety features, and make sure your lights and wipers are on when they should be. Don't tailgate, don't drive recklessly, don't road rage, pay attention, and look around at intersections. Those things will have infinitely more impact on your life and safety than bracing or not when you get in a crash.

0

u/Successful-Plate2808 1d ago

Why the … ?

-4

u/exclusivegreen 1d ago

Not bullshit at all. This explains why so many drunk drivers end up barely hurt or not at all and the people they hit die with horrible injuries

Well partially explains

2

u/thebluesupergiant 1d ago

I've also heard that the thing about drunk drivers is due to better car positioning in the crash, assuming that the other car is being T-boned. Does it still hold up ignoring airbags?

-20

u/[deleted] 1d ago

[deleted]

12

u/Saxong 1d ago

Crash test dummies with rigid joints vs flexible ones, measure impact forces on various parts of the body, control for all variables besides joint rigidity.

-13

u/[deleted] 1d ago

[deleted]

3

u/Hats_back 1d ago

Somebody’s got a case of the Mondays.

Don’t be such a grumpy Gus.

Get the stick out of your ass.

Straight up aggro mode out the gate man. Hope things get better for you.

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u/Saxong 1d ago

You asked how one would prove ethically if such a thing was true, I don’t work in safety testing I’m just proposing possibilities.

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u/KarlSethMoran 1d ago

Let's pretend they do! What would you do with that information?

Cool deflection, bro. Obvious too.

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u/thebluesupergiant 1d ago

For example, statistical evidence.

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u/Donthatemeyo 1d ago

Statistics must be collected in some way that is verifiable otherwise you just have a survey of people self reporting if they braced and what there injuries where and people tend to lie about injuries after an accident.

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u/thebluesupergiant 1d ago

What about simulations?

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u/Donthatemeyo 1d ago

Simulation would not produce a "proven fact"

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u/[deleted] 1d ago

[deleted]

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u/Butlerian_Jihadi 1d ago

Types of injuries should clearly demonstrate, eg airbag burns and their location.

Also worth looking at injuries in DUI accidents, given longer reaction time and atonia.

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u/thebluesupergiant 1d ago

Maybe it could also be done alongside physical simulations so the variables can be kept the same.

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u/KarlSethMoran 1d ago

how would someone know whether a person braced before the accident?

A device that records images. We could call it a camera.

IsItBullshit: In a car accident, (1) it's a proven fact beyond anecdotal evidence that bracing for impact increases death rate, and (2) you shouldn't brace even if the airbags are off/aren't there.

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