Quote:
Originally Posted by davepl
I frankly don't get it. We've seen lawsuits for people being burned to death by rear-mount fuel tanks in everything from Crown Victorias to Pintos to, this month, the Grand Cherokee and other vehicles.
We've seen saddle tank locations blow up (sometimes on TV with a little help).
You know what we don't see? People burned by in-cab-mount tanks. I don't think I've heard of any survivable contemporary accounts either.
I literally forgot about it until writing this post, but when I was little we had a local (2 blocks away) kid burned to death in his Nova near my house after being rear-ended. They blamed it on rear lift shackles (as was the style at the time).
My original intent was to relocate it like most others feel intuitively needs to be done, but I ultimately decided that if the cab were deformed enough to rupture an in-tank installation I probably wasn't around to worry about it anyway.
Besides, all you're doing is moving the tank back into a -more- vulnerable location with a whole bunch of extra fuel lines. Granted it's now outside the cab, but like I said, if you were hit hard enough that the tank would have been deformed had it been there, you're likely not springing out anyway, so who's to say how much it'd help in a worst-case scenario?
Ultimately people should make their own decisions, of course, because they have to live and die by them. I just feel some shaky assumptions go into the calculus of moving the tank, including my own initial desire to do so.
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Dave, of all of the cars you mention the only one with a full frame is the crown Vic. The Jeep Cherokee, Pinto and Nova are all unibody cars which fold up like a beer can on impact. I can't say if the in-cab tank is safer or more dangerous than a rear mount tank. Who knows? I sure don't, but the persistent smell of gas in the cab of my truck vanished when I moved that tank.