Okay, good question. No yes or no answers, and I'll tell you why.

In any engineering design, you have to look at a system. A system has different elements in it. You have to look at all the elements, design them, operate them, and maintain them to achieve a certain goal. In this system, if you have spent all your money on one element, you are not going to have an efficient system satisfying your needs. With tank cars, you have car designs. That's one. Here it was said that operation is another part of it. The product you put in there is another part of it. Education is a part of it. You cannot just focus on one element of the system and forget about the others.

Let me put it in a different format. Every one of us drives a car, and we have accidents on the roads. What do we do? Are we going to jump the gun and say, “All these are small cars. We should eliminate them. Everybody should use SUVs because they are safer.” Or we go back and look at the data. We root cause the problem, and set up a DOE—design of experiment—and set all these parameters here based on real data. We say, “There are ten factors; these are the results.” There is a program within Six Sigma that you can use. It will show you what the effect is of each element on the system, what the effect is of two elements' interaction on the system, or three interactions, and so forth.

So if you ask me if we should go ahead and increase the thickness, I say, “What's the purpose of that?” I'm saying that if you add 10,000 pounds to this car, are you getting the same ratio increase in the safety? No. Based on the fatigue life, static analysis, and dynamic analysis, you get 5% at a maximum.

The other factor I want to add is that when designing the automobiles we drive, everybody's life is in it, and they are moving on the roads, the streets, and outside. Are they going to, based on some accidents, increase the light weight of those cars by 500 pounds just to make it safer? No, they look at what the cost is to address the issue right there.

So we have to be very careful. I'm just coming from my profession.

These new cars, the CPC-1232, the total number from 2011 up to here is only 14,000, compared to almost, let's say, 90,000 DOT-111s. We should go back, look at the data. How many accidents on the legacy cars? How many accidents on the good-faith cars? Then we know which direction we should go. Is this new design not enough, or is it enough? If I add another 16, how long does it take me to get back together here and add another 16, or another half inch to it? We should have a target in our minds.

I'm just coming from pure engineering.

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