Opel Senator B
When the Senator B was launched in 1987, the crash safety of the Senator B could just be seen as standard, although BMW and Mercedes were already setting significantly higher standards and Audi was also investing more in improved safety technology (Procon-ten). The new Senator also scored points for the seat belt height adjustment introduced in the same way as the Omega for the rear seats and the seat belt buckles through the rear seat bench. Both of these measures enabled a significantly improved belt routing for people of different sizes compared to the competition. In this way, unnecessary risk of injury, which resulted from an unfavorable belt routing on the body, could be reduced. The following figure shows the rear impact of a ram sledge at a speed of 50 km / h. It remains to be seen whether the tank (75 liters) under the trunk floor would remain leak-proof in practice in the event of such a collision and not create an additional fire hazard. In addition, it is easy to see that the structure of the passenger compartment is at the limit of its performance. An EU-NCAP impact speed of approx. 64 km / h, which is common nowadays, would probably lead to the collapse of the passenger cell. The unavailability of an airbag system meant a significant deterioration in the Senator's market opportunities by 1990 at the latest, when the below-average passive safety of the Omega became apparent in a crash test by Auto, Motor und Sport in cooperation with the ADAC.
It is certainly not the fault of the Opel engineers and technicians that Omega and Senator showed glaring weaknesses here in particular. In Europe at that time, the test standards for crash tests to obtain a general operating license for a vehicle were at a very modest level. Omega and Senator fully met the legally required standards and the safety of the body structures was not yet a decisive criterion for many customers, because at that time there was no objective comparison with competitors. The salespeople at Opel (and especially at GM) showed no inclination to invest millions in improving passive safety to the recognized high level of a Mercedes or BMW. The improvement in passive safety would of course have made both the Opel Omega and the Opel Senator much more expensive. If the price of the Omega in particular had increased too much compared to the Rekord E, a large part of its traditional regular customers would certainly have been lost
From model year 1990, the Senator B, Omega A Caravan 3.0i and the Omega 3000 were fitted with a 490 mm long steel cable between the steering column and the transmission tunnel, which should prevent the steering wheel from moving too much in the event of an offset crash. The change in the steering wheel position found in crash tests led to avoidable, high risk of injury to the driver's head and cervical spine. A retrofitting of this system was not planned at the factory, however, an exact description of the system was given in the technical innovations, so that the Opel authorized workshops would have been able to carry out a professional retrofitting at special customer request. With this measure carried out by ADAC and Auto, Motor und Sport about a year before the devastating crash test, it can hardly be denied that Opel was aware of the glaring safety risks posed by Omega and Senator, especially in the offset crash