Basically it is the guns don’t kill people issue. You gotta drive the car. As a safe defensive driver I do not hit things (weather even). My wife on the other hand has 6 expensive accidents(to be fair it is over 12 years) including one in our driveway. She is a good driver but prone to be distracted. As to the cost of beaters. You cannot get them in new england and many other salted areas. Everything has airbags. ABS like any brake needs a non moron to use. Some folk in winter here think 4wd and ABS makes it safe to drive like morons on ice and slush.
In spite of good intentions, I’m afraid cars are getting too sophisticated to continue to be affordable. It seems we are going back to the days when cars were virtually hand-built masterpieces for the wealthiest few. I wonder how long this can keep up as North America becomes poorer and poorer…
“I’m afraid cars are getting too sophisticated to continue to be affordable.”
It hasn’t happened yet. Every comparison I’ve seen between equal-size similar-option cars from, say, 20 years ago and today indicates little price change, once you adjust for inflation. There is lots of dicussion on how the new super-high mpg standards will increase car prices, but we’ll have to wait and see.
The original post listed safety features that are available on just a few of the cars on the road, primarily new luxury cars. Perhaps if all these features were actually on 80% of the cars on the road some drivers would get lazy.
As I see it the sensors compensate for design flaws and driver flaws too. Many people have problems turning around and looking out the back window when driving. They are just not flexible enough to do it, so they back up blind or looking at side view mirrors. These drivers benefit from back up cameras and sensors. Some driver’s are flexible and could look backwards but they are driving mini vans or SUV’s with a horrible view out the back window. These vehicles benefit from a backup camera and sensor since no driver’s can effectively see behind the vehicle.
The side sensors that tell the driver there is a vehicle in the lane wouldn’t be necessary if drivers knew how to set the side view mirrors properly. However very few drivers do set the mirrors properly and therefore the sensors will benefit them.
Even if I was the driver of one of these tech ladden super safe cars I’d still drive the same way.
Some safety systems require other safety systems to compensate.
Higher window lines mean you can’t see all around as well as you could in older cars, so you need sensors to see in your blind spots for you.
Higher trunk lines mean smaller rear windows, which make it impossible to see behind you without opening up your door and looking back or needing sensors/cameras to see behind you. Plus, how many kids/pets have been saved by having those sensors/cameras installed on the vehicles?
“Higher trunk lines mean smaller rear windows, which make it impossible to see behind you without opening up your door and looking back or needing sensors/cameras to see behind you”.
@bscar2–Good point. I remember my first car–a 1947 Pontiac Streamliner fastback. The rear window was more like a skylight. The car had terrible visibility to the rear. My next cars were a real improvement in visibility. Now it seems as though we are going back the other direction.
It seems to me that some of the best safety factors include good handling, good braking, good visibility and good lighting. Cars have improved on the first two–handling a braking, but it seems as though we may have gone the other way on good visibility and headlights.
From my experience with an older car(65 Malibu), I’d say we improved 3 out of the 4.
I had a very small blind spot on either side of the Malibu and was able to see the front and back of the car out the windows. My 7 all I see if the bottom of my windshield/wipers and the road, and while I do have good visibility, I still have larger blind spots than my Chevelle; I couldn’t back my 7 up looking out the rear window to save my life.
My Chevlle had horrible low beam headlights. They were 2 tiny globes of light on the road that didn’t shine very far in front of the car; whether this was due to bad aim or bad design, I don’t know. The brights lit up the road decently. My 7 has HIDs, which I’m not too thrilled with, but they do provide good lighting a fair distance up the road from me and the fog lights help light the way where my normal lights don’t do so well. The brights make it seem like it’s daytime out.
The Chevelle’s brake pedal was something more like a suggestion for the car to stop, not a demand, and if you couldn’t pull into a parking spot right the first time and needed small corrections, good luck with that. No power steering and 4 drum brakes made it terrible by any standard today, and probablyeven some back then
Our 2011 Toyota Sienna has a sharp cutoff on low beams that isn’t true of our 2003 Toyota 4Runner nor was it the case on the 2006 Chevrolet Uplander we used to own. No minivan I have driven handles as well as a regular car, although the visibility is very good.
"Higher trunk lines mean smaller rear windows, which make it impossible to see behind you without opening up your door and looking back or needing sensors/cameras to see behind you."
Unfortunately, this and reduced aerodynamic efficiency is the price we must pay for the latest, radical, door-stop styling. It seems now that some of the vehicles might be going back to the more attractive flowing lines.
"dagosa September 19 Are cars too safe ? Would you like a girl friend/ wife too pretty ?"
Completely right - hahaha
Are cars too safe ? Would you like a girl friend/ wife too pretty ?
Not really. Here in Mexico, they joke about fathers with gorgeous daughters having to sleep with one eye open. Give me personality and intelligence, in a 7 any day.
Triedaq, I have still two old magazines written by Tom McCahill. I don’t mean MI with his column. I mean he wrote at least two complete magazines on car issues. All the issues we discuss here; what to buy; when to sell; how to maintain; how to drive. Somehow I have kept them all these years.
Well…I don’t think cars can ever be TOO safe, but I think we are starting to get into high tech safety equipment that a decent driver should be just fine without. Meanwhile, the real issue is not being addressed. I think the standards of driver training and testing in the USA are a joke! Everyday I see people driving 20-30 MPH over the speed limit, driving in clusters, tailgating, cutting each other off and jumping lanes (with poorly adjusted mirrors, I might add), and just generally trying to be first at any cost, all while yakking or texting on their cell phones, reading the paper, and drinking coffee. People don’t seem to give a damn if they cause an accident or are involved in one so long as they can prove it isn’t their fault. And the police don’t seem to enforce unsafe driving issues, as it is much easier to sit at the bottom of a hill on a 4-lane with a 25 MPH limit tagging people who are no danger whatsoever.
When ABS, stability control, traction control, lane departure alerts, collision avoidance alerts, etc…become required, it will be awfully expensive to pass inspection when this crap starts to break! We already have minor collisions that result in $5,000 worth of airbags needing replaced.
I think it’s terrible that we are starting to desire expensive technology to protect people from themselves, technology that could become a very expensive requirement in the not-so-far future.
Long ago I learned to appreciate that fun didn’t equal happiness and glamorous didn’t equal beautiful. Lucky for me there have been a few people in my life who appreciated me in spite of my looks. A couple have been quite attractive from many angles.
Cars are too safe if
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No readily available version in the manufacturer’s line is affordable.
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The car’s complexity makes both the car and the safety features unreliable.
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The safety feature itself — if it fails – can cause injury.
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The cost to diagnose and repair the safety feature or the car itself becomes unaffordable.
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In a collision with another car, the safety feature results in more damage and injury to to the other car and its passengers.
When they built the Hoover Dam there were signs about that read “The best safety device is a careful man.” Oh, if only we could have that mindset today. We’ve got so many safety inspections and safety devices that pretty soon when something goes wrong it will be impossible for it to be human error.
“Give me personality and intelligence” and beauty. I don’t think they are mutually exclusive.
I read this thing (wish I could remember the site to post it) about how in Australia, they’re testing these ‘‘robot cars’’… I think it was 3,000 or 30,000 hours of testing, and these robot cars had only 2 accidents… The first, when a car driven by a real person rear ended the robot car… And the second, when a real person took manual control over the robot car… Crazy, right? Sooner or later, we’re going to be napping in the drivers seat…
The Japanese are totally confused by the American approach to safety. They see about 30,000 car fatalities per year, a fraction of the figure (1/26th) on a mileage basis compared to the 50s. At the same time the number of gun deaths per million inhabitants is several hundred times what it is in Japan. Bloomsberg recently did a study and Japan reported only 68 gun death per year in Japan, where guns are prohibited. The US figure is close to 10,000. You might call this an unintended consequence of the Second Amendment.
At the rate we are going gun deaths, now at 1/3 of highway deaths per year, will some day eclipse car deaths, which are the result of millions of citizens HAVING TO DRIVE TO WORK.
Go figure!
How many have owned a lawnmower that would continue to run if you stepped away from it? How about a car or truck that could be cranked in gear? For all the great leaps in intelligence in recent years there has been a similar decline in personal responsibility and common sense in a great many areas. The single most significant safety feature in automobiles and lawnmowers and toasters is the person operating them and for every technological advance in safety there is a rush to push past the new threshold for safety. I recently watched the cruise ship Triumph’s grand voyage to Mobile Bay and wondered how such a multi-million dollar party barge could have been so poorly planned that it was left adrift, dark and dirty, with a ship full of engineers and ‘technicians’ and a $billion corporation to come to the rescue. The Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria were much more capable.