So I’ve been looking at motorcycles a lot lately, thinking it’d be nice to be vrooming around on one. And today, I finally put one and one together on something.

In my Engineering and Public Policy seminar, my professor was going over some case studies we’d be looking at. One of them was about GM’s side saddle gas tanks. Maybe 20 years ago(?) GM made a change in their pickup truck designs. Previously gas tanks had been in the cab behind the seats, but with the new model of pickup that featured a single long strut running from the front axle to the back axle under the truck bed, an engineer realized that why not stick the gas tank alongside that strut under the bed? This would allow not only a bigger tank to be used, but would also allow two tanks to be used, vastly increasing the pickup’s effective range on a full tank, something consumers had been demanding for a while. Thus was born GM’s side saddle gas tanks.
So what’s the problem? Well, a pickup has side fairings that come down, but those are purely cosmetic, and it turned out that while from any other angle the truck had become safer, a side collision would cause the gas tanks to rupture and explode.

There’s this guy with a sport bike on campus who recently started parking his bike at a place I walk by on the way to school, and I’d been noticing the way the gas door thingy sat handsomely on top of the tank in the middle of the bike. Well I’ll be fucked if it doesn’t turn out that when you’re riding that thing, you’re not just sitting your ass on top of an engine, but you’re wrapping yourself around a jolly ol’ gas tank. What an incentive not to crash?

“In your professional opinion, was there any more dangerous place to put these gas tanks than in this side saddle configuration?”
“Like on the front bumper?”
-paraphrased court transcript