Over the years, several papers have taken cheap shots at SMAC or CRASH, some funded by automobile manufacturers, and some as thinly veiled sales pitches for competing software or services. This page will contain a list of some of the more onerous papers and our responses to the papers.
In February 1987 at the SAE CRASH3 workshop, a speaker stated that they had found a bug/error in the CRASH3 program Trajectory Analysis procedure related to the friction zones. I quickly rose and corrected/educated the speaker that they were wrong, this was NOT an error/bug! The Trajectory solution procedure of CRASH uses logic and code from SMAC and the line defining the friction zones has a built in 'mirror image' for simplification of logic.
In October 1987 at a CRASH coefficient protocol subgroup committee meeting at SAE a company announced that they had quickly created a commercial 'crush coefficient database' product.
Starting in the 1980s a lot of 'experts' in litigation matters were misrepresenting the accuracy of CRASH and SMAC, and some were testifying and publishing that CRASH was more accurate than SMAC? (for example see the post below about a 2003 book!) And that CRASH was a highly accurate program! We contacted NHTSA and asked that they send a clarification of the status of SMAC and CRASH.
"NASS is a program to collect data on a large sample of highway crashes ...
"The PC version of CRASH that we use... We know it has its limitations (see Carl Nash's SAE Paper 870040, CRASH3: Current Status, 1987 and our August 1989 response to GM Docket 86-06) but it is simple, inexpensive and well suited to the experience and education level of people we can afford to have collecting NASS data."
"We have always recognized that the SMAC computer program, which was developed for NHTSA in 1972, is more sophisticated and more accurate than the CRASH3 we are using but the relative expense and application complexity make it unsuitable for our purposes"
Also note due to the overwhelming requests from litigation attorneys about CRASH, NHTSA went about with a 'Reformulation of CRASH' and also created WinSMASH which is ONLY available for NHTSA NASS teams (so no public distribution) to avoid further time consuming litigation related inquiries about CRASH.
1997:
For the 1997 SAE congress the McHenry's published 4 papers and dealt with 8 reviewers as a part of the peer review process. It was a pleasure to work with 7 of the 8 reviewers and we thank them for taking the time and effort to review and provide constructive comments on our papers.
One of the 8 reviewers made the review process an unreasonable and offensive experience.
An apology for the offensive situation with acknowledgement of the many errors should have been required by SAE from the author prior SAE allowing the author to publish any paper related to the topic. The 1998 paper is simply a CYA by the author
A book published in 2003 and brought to our attention in 2004 or so, has a section entitled "Issues to Watch out For" (p 86) where the authors make critical, somewhat silly, comments on SMAC like:
"to compute these mutual vehicle collision forces SMAC uses an algorithm even less scientific than CRASH3"??!!
In 2008, AAAM published a paper Minor crashes and 'whiplash' in the United States authored by Bartsch AJ, Gilbertson LG, Prakash V, Morr DR, Wiechel JF which incorrectly mentions m-smac and m-crash with no basis in fact or research:
Summary above now includes link to explan erroneous statements about m-smac and m-crash in a 2008 AAAM paper:
2008:
In 2008, AAAM published a paper Minor crashes and 'whiplash' in the United States authored by Bartsch AJ, Gilbertson LG, Prakash V, Morr DR, Wiechel JF which incorrectly mentions m-smac and m-crash with no basis in fact or research:
Aug 2020: Came across a 1990 letter from NHTSA clarifying information on SMAC and CRASH.
We've added it above to the summary of information on SMAC and CRASH to clarify the NHTSA position:
See information adjacent to: