With neither a seat belt nor airbag in either car, it wouldn’t matter is what I’m saying. Whichever car is heavier would probably be safer. He said he survived 45 MPH head on with no seat belt in a 70s car. Hitting a stopped car at under 45 MPH with no seat belt would be a far more accurate description of the accident.
Yup!
Although there was an uptick in highway fatalities in 2020, prior to that year highway fatality rates dropped progressively over the decades. By 2018, the highway fatality rate was about 1/3 of the rate in 1978.
Absolutely not.
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I think whichever car “gives” is going to be slightly safer in that case. You’re going to hit the steering wheel/dash/windshield in both. You’ll hit it slightly slower in a car that crumples a bit, right? That LTD don’t look like a crumpler lol.
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The problem is that in very old cars, the steering column was made of cast iron, and the steering wheel was made of cast iron dipped in hard plastic. The only way you will survive an impact in that old car is if you are wearing your seat belt, and the front bench seat is far enough back from the steering wheel that you don’t get crushed by it.
I can tell you this as someone who walked away from a very serious accident in a 1991 Tercel. The car itself crunched up quite a bit, and as a result, the steering wheel became closer to the driver’s seat. The only reason I wasn’t injured was because I had the seat as far back on the tracks as it would go, and because I always wear my seat belt. A shorter person with the seat closer to the steering wheel probably would have been crushed upon impact, and suffered broken ribs, etc.
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In southern Illinois where I grew up we called them “bumper guards.”
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Let’s not forget that in some cars, the steering box was located very far forward, and even a relatively minor impact had the potential of driving that rigid steering column and rigid steering wheel back into your head.
Perhaps the best example of this was the Corvair. If there had been an engine in front, it could have ameliorated this problem to some extent, but the absence of an engine almost always meant that a frontal collision drove the steering column and steering wheel back–into the driver’s face–by an incredible amount.
More like deaths reduced to 1/4 since 1971 to 2019, which is close to the beginning of seat belts in cars until now. 4.4 deaths per 100,000,000 miles to 1.1 in 2019. Then up to 1.37 in 2020 during the pandemic as speeding and seat belt laws were not enforced by the police.
My opinion is that most of the reduction is due to increased seat belt use and the creation of the interstate high way system, which took a lot of cars off of two lane non divided roads, and reduced head on accidents which would have a big impact on drivers that continued to not use seat belts.
Today roughly 10% of drivers who don’t wear seat belts account for half of fatalities. If you went back to the 70s when majority of passengers did not wear seat belts, the effect of buckling up back then would have been huge.
Cars today are safer, but driving speeds have increased. I can’t say that driving on a two lane non divided road with a late model car today with current driving speeds would be safer than driving a typical 70s car at 70s driving speeds with a lap and shoulder belt in use.
I don’t know the answer to this! The particular people on this forum can say that I’m full of crap. They can say that the former president of the IIHS is full of crap. They can say that I’m trolling. It’s what they always do with any information that doesn’t agree with what the auto makers want people thinking about.
Yes! Which is why collapsible steering columns and seatbelts were mandated for all US cars in 1968. And shoulder belts in 1970.
Most of which people didn’t wear when most highway speed limits were 70 mph and secondary roads were 60 mph.
Then we got the 55 mph limits which did nothing, statistically, to reduce traffic deaths. Yeah, there was a short 1 year drop that went right back ip to match the downward trend it had been on for decades.
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As backup cameras are wide-angle lenses, they can see more than you can see in the mirrors. They can see cars coming as you’re backing out of a space in a crowded parking lot, which you can’t see because your view is blocked by the truck next to you. They can see below the glass line of the rear window, which you can’t see because you don’t have x-ray vision.
Backup cameras absolutely increase what you can see. If a driver fails to look in the few places backup cameras can’t see, that means the driver is unsafe, not the camera.
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+1
When I was in the process of buying my current vehicle, the saleslady (who was a very sharp person who was actually knowledgeable about cars in general, as well as the ones that she was selling) stated that my backup camera’s view included what was below the rear bumper.
I was initially skeptical of her claim, but Dagmar turned out to be correct. In addition to having an extremely wide lateral view, it also shows me what is at ground level, right beneath my bumper. That feature saved one of my tires from being damaged when I forgot that I had left a garden rake on the floor of the garage, with its teeth pointing up. On that occasion, it saved one of my tires, but its angle of view would potentially let me see if one of my neighbor’s urchins was playing hide & seek behind the vehicle, and that advantage would be–literally–priceless.
Yup!
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I bought a 65 Chevelle Malibu back in 2004 and had it fixed up and drove it around. I also made fun of people who only “drove” their car to the local shows and didn’t bother to actually use it for anything else.
Manual steering, 2 speed auto, 2bbl 283ci small block, 4 drum brakes. I kinda miss it, but I have nowhere to keep it where I’m living today. Don’t miss the Civic in the picture as sitting so low to the ground and feeling the unplowed snow scrape across the bottom of the car is not something I enjoyed hearing.
Update: They bought the Civic. Unfortunately, I’ve only seen a cell phone photo of the interior so far. She says he doesn’t like how the brake pedal feels so he’s going to take it to the shop where he works. With any luck that will be all it needs. I can hope, anyway.
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The civic should work well for them at least in the short term, Should be looked at overall to figure out what’s needed most and what can be planned for down the road. My dad’s been really focused on safety for all of us and things like having good tires on the car with a focus on having the safest car you can even on a budget.
Back in 2006 dad drove the 20yr old Mazda 626 that my brother and his now wife would drive long distances in back from the airport, in that 45mi trip he found so many things not right about the car that he pushed my brother to upgrade to something better. They still have the 2006 Legacy Wagon that dad loaned the money to buy and was paid in full a year later.
To be fair, that isn’t what he said. The front end safety ratings don’t take mass into account because they simulate impact with an immovable object, not another vehicle. In a collision with another vehicle, weight absolutely makes a difference. It was a bit of a straw man to respond to that with the comparison between new cars and old, since no one said mass was the only determining factor. I’ll admit the bit about BOF vs. unibody didn’t make much sense to me, but that wasn’t the crux of the point.
To put it in physical terms, in a collision with a much larger vehicle, yours has to dissipate more energy than it would in an impact with a stationary object. Even in a modern car with crumple zones and a strong passenger cabin, there’s a limit to how much energy can be dissipated before the interior space begins to deform. If I’m in a head-on in a modern car, I’m undoubtedly safer if the other car is substantially lighter than mine.
I definitely agree on not silencing dissent; none of the posts here came across as trolling at all. If we silence anyone we disagree with, we suppress any sort of exchange of ideas.
I’d say weight is still a factor. A 4,000 pound object is harder to stop than a 2,000 pound object, which will affect the crash outcome. As noted above, cars of the mid century were often heavier than cars of today, but 99% of us here would much rather be in a modern car with modern crumple zones, seat belts, air bags, steering columns that don’t stab us in the chest, etc, during a wreck, and the other 1% are wrong. 
I do agree that weight makes a difference in a collision with another vehicle (and said as much, above) but that can’t really be said to be a safety enhancer.
Saying “heavier vehicles are safer because they are heavier than other vehicles” essentially guarantees an arms race, which we’re already seeing and have been seeing for years. People get bigger and bigger vehicles in the name of “safety” which requires people to get bigger and bigger vehicles. At some point, we might as well all do our new car shopping at the Kenworth dealership.
Plus there’s the problem that heavier may help keep you safe in a collision with a smaller vehicle, but it will also hinder you from avoiding that collision in the first place, and it may well cause you to wreck - after all, heavier vehicles are usually SUVs, and those usually have a higher cg than lighter cars, making them more apt to roll.
In short, the advice “get a heavier vehicle for better safety” is at best only a bandaid, because once everyone else gets a heavier vehicle you’re back to ground zero unless you go get an even heavier vehicle.
I will admit to a certain amount of touchiness with this user, as he’s also been telling people about fooling with seat belt systems over a weird conspiracy theory he has about car makers installing load limiters to intentionally reduce seat belt effectiveness. That line is foolish on a number of levels. Even if the load limiters were making seat belts less safe (they’re not), non-professionals fooling around with restraint systems they don’t understand is just not a good idea at all.
So when he starts in on other half-baked “safety” topics that users unfamiliar with his post history might take at face value, several of us object. No one, that I know of anyway, has asked that he be silenced. But as the antidote to bad speech is more good speech, we’re going to exercise that when he does things like this.
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Well said, although one would presume a car that’s heavier has also been designed with proportionally stronger brakes.
But yeah, the 90s and early 2000s (up until the high gas prices and financial meltdown starting around 2007) were basically an SUV arms race. Newer ones are getting heavier thanks to more features but at least handle and stop better than they used to.
I haven’t seen any of this guy’s other comments so I can’t really judge that; I was just going by this thread.
I contacted the Moderator by personal message shortly after he showed up here asking that at least he be given a ’ Time Out ’ until he agreed to stop posting false information.
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Imagine some 4" steel square tube with 1/4" wall. Now consider 8" square tube with 1/8" wall. They both have the same amount of steel in them and have the same weight but the 8" tube will be twice as strong when supporting a load that is perpendicular to the tube or beam. Within reason here, I’m not talking about shear loads.
Furthermore, think of a pickup truck frame. The bumper, engine, front axle, cab, bed, rear axle, and rear bumper are all separate pieces that are held together by the frame. The truck bed is almost made out of enough steel to be able to do the job of the rear section of the frame, but it isn’t used. You can take the bed off and the truck will still drive fine. Imagine how much weight would be saved if the section of frame that goes under the truck bed was eliminated and the bed itself was the structure that held the back end of the truck together.
That’s the basic idea behind the unibody. It can be much stronger than a frame while using the same amount of steel because it uses the larger area of the body of the vehicle for the structure.
We got a bigger vehicle to tow and carry all the stuff we take on vacation, skipped a truck as wife wanted fully adjustable passenger seat, heated seats and steering wheel and remote start. Safety was not even a consideration!