How many of you install a roll cage?

[bbs]

Browsing for paint colors, I see Kevin Hart's roof crushed Cuda.  Makes me wonder if I should add a roll cage.

https://www.phillyvoice.com/kevin-hart-car-lacked-crucial-safety-features-crash-likely-led-severe-injuries/

[Brads70]

Check with your insurance company first. Mine won't insure a vehicle with a cage or wheel tubs. Also roll cages can be dangerous in that they are usually designed for race cars that use roll bar padding and a helmet. Bouncing your head off a roll bar can be fatal in an accident, especially without a helmet. For both the driver and passengers.  Arms and legs also break under impacts.  Improperly mounted seat belts can also be fatal or cause serious injury. Most people do not realize how far/much the body moves during a collision, never mind a high speed impact. Also critical is having roll cages welded by someone that really knows how to weld. Roll bars held together with bubble gum welds break and tubing then becomes  projectiles. I've seen this during my time as a tech inspector for circle track racing.
There is a place for roll cages, just needs to be carefully thought out for the intended purposes. Most street cars are safer without them. It's the combination of all the safety equipment working together that is most effective. Helmut's, seat belts, seats mounted to cage not floors etc..... cage engineered in such a way that it bends, folds where you want it too, away from driver.       

[cuda hunter]

My main cuda is an 11 second 1/4 car.   
I have a roll cage.  Mostly due to the car being able to do the 10. 

Agree with Brad whole heartedly. 

[bbs]

Good to know, thanks for the feedback.  I won't have a back seat, maybe a 4 or 6-point roll bar without bars near the front seats will suffice.

[bbs]

btw I do recall now videos of passengers in a rear-end collision, the seat partially reclines and the body slides up toward the roof with the top of the head straight to where the rollbar would be.

I haven't seen many rollbars over the rear seats far from the front passengers, but that would partially protect from a collapsed roof as in the Hart accident.

[torredcuda]

Sanctioning bodies like NHRA have rules for placement of bars relative to drivers position, padding, and require a helmet if the car is equipped with one for safety reasons. Bare minimum if I were to have one on a street driven car would be plenty of padding around drive and passenger areas and five point harnesses would be a good idea. Solid steel tubes near your head would not be good in an accident.

[HP2]

Agree with others here about the risks of using bars/cages in street cars. I'd also recommend not disregarding NHRA's 70 years of information about bar/cage placement and requirements in adapting basically stock vehicles to high-speed usage. Could you place a bar/cage in such a manner to reduce the street risks, yes, no doubt it could be done. To do it in this manner also would require considerably more surgery to the vehicle than simply welding in the necessary plates and tubes and would require custom bent tubing to embed the tubing into the vehicles structure as well as modifications to interior panels/dash/headliner.

While Kevin Hart and his car both suffered significant damaged in that accident, we also have to keep in mind that he survived the accident with recoverable injuries. The picture above shows the vehicle post extraction with the roof cut off. While we don't know the exact details of occupant recovery, any additional structure installed in the vehicle would have also been removed by First Responders if they felt it was the best way to get to the occupants.

[tparker]

Just thinking out loud a bit. Why would you need a roll bar? Serious question. What are you expecting to protect yourself from, assuming that is the reason?

Kevin Hart and 2 other people survived. One was not really injured, I don't think the driver was that injured but I don't know, and Kevin suffered enough to require several surgeries. Would a rollbar prevented those injuries? Turns out no one was wearing seat belts. That alone probably would have helped a lot. An article mentioned the driver, not Hart, lost control around a corner. He probably wasn't real familiar with the cars power and probably gave it a bit much. Enough to launch the car off the road.

The other part is I believe they were probably squirreling around and were in the mountains. The car apparently rolled down a bit of hill/embankment or something similar. I suspect there was some shady driving going, the kind that has claimed many cars and lives.

My thoughts are forget the rollbar, know the car before you start playing around in potentially risky places, and where seatbelts at least when you start getting on it. LOL, I know, no fun.

[HP2]

That's my thoughts that I may not have adequately explained. The photo above is the car with the roof cut off it after occupant extraction. We don't have a picture of it prior to extraction. The roof was intact after the crash. All occupants survived the crash, in spite of not wearing seatbelts. The details you describe about the driver combined with failure to use available safety equipment and the environment the crash occurred in are all key factors for this crash and resulting injuries.

NHRA doesn't require roll BARS until you are at the 11.49 e.t. range and CAGES aren't necessary until the 10 second/135 mph threshold, which is a lot faster than most of our restored cars will be. When they do require them, they have specific requirements for tube distances to head, shoulders, roof, doors along with locations for support on fore/aft/lateral resistance that make them more safe and less easy to live with in a street car. Compromises to bars/cages to make them more street friendly run the risk of not being approved for competition use, if that is even a goal of the car. Combine all of those with the possible insurability issues, and it can become net liability rather than a safety feature.