All of what you said is true, but this especially. The kid in the front seat wasn’t in any more danger than his parents - if there’s a crash, they’re all gonna eat dashboard due to lack of passenger restraints.
There’s been an interesting cultural shift over time. We’ve gotten a lot safer, but we’ve also gotten a lot more terrified when something isn’t safe.
A plane crashes and there are calls to tear down the airport because it’s dangerous. Well… Yeah! You’re telling gravity to get bent! Of course it’s dangerous! That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it.
It’d be nice if we could adopt more of a “let’s make this as safe as we reasonably can, but not go overboard and not pretend that anything short of 100% risk-free is terrible” attitude.
50 years ago 7 out of 10 doctors recommended smoking Salems and tail pipes were chalk white from the lead in fuel. But I can think of a great many cultural and legal changes, some for the better and some for worse in recent years. But from different view points good and bad seem interchangeable now as always.
I had to ride in a car seat when I was an infant. It hooked over the seat in the 1939 Chevrolet my parents owned. It really wasn’t very safe by today’s standards. When my brother came along four years later, he used that infant seat and I rode in the back seat. One thing that car seat had that my brother and I used was an ashtray. Today’s baby seats don’t have this feature. I was born just after WW II started and my brother came along just after WW II. We all smoked back then as we rode along in our unsafe baby seats.
I don’t know how old I was but just vaguely remember. I was in the high chair at the table and my folks and sister took off in the car. Some time a little latter they looked around and said “where’s Bing?” and came back and got me. I’ve never been the same since.
OK get the rotten eggs ready, I don’t take away the responsibility of the parents at all but seems to me a prosecutor and a jury coming up with this is just an example of how lop-sided our legal system has become. Of course it is wrong and contributed but car seats should not be meant to mitigate irresponsible driving by the person that ran into them. Just remember a local prosecutor with a personal ax to grind can put you in jeopardy for years and bankrupt you regardless of your innocence. We finally fired and voted out our local prosecutor for doing similar. When you are targeted, it never ends well, whether guilty or innocent.
That’s exactly my point. There’s a difference, I think, between causing harm and not preventing harm. One is active, one is passive. The driver of the second car actively caused damage and bodily harm. The mother didn’t prevent it.
Mom should get a ticket. Rear end guy should bear the cost of all physical and material damage and medical costs.
From 1957 and earlier, child safety meant buying a two door car so you didn’t have too worry about the kids opening the rear doors. There weren’t even mounting points for after market seat belts, much less child safety seats.
It means we accept that we can’t make everything 100% safe, and stop freaking out when random and exceedingly rare bad things happen. A guy crashed his old warbird at my local airport yesterday, and I’ve already heard people making noise about how we should ban flying old warbirds.
People fly the things every day. Crashes are very rare. Thinking we should ban them because one guy crashed one, and wasn’t even killed, is insane. But it’s a fairly typical attitude toward safety in our culture.
We see the same thing with cars. Cars hitting pedestrians and sending them into the windshield is a rare event, but all of today’s car noses look weird because we’ve just gotta make sure that if we run someone over they fall in front of the car and not into the windshield. It’s silly, especially in light of the fact that there are plenty of things that kill more people annually than pedestrians-in-windshields, that we aren’t doing anything about.
NHTSA and other organizations evaluate proposed safety measures by how much they will save, in lives, health, and money. If we put a price on lives and health (based on the median income?) we could compare the saving to the cost. The medical community does this all the time to recommend or not therapies.
I’d pay the taxes to buy carseats for all. NM has a program for ‘poor’ people, but they have to apply, something ‘poor’ people don’t always. I’d issue a voucher every time a birth is registered, follow up if it isn’t redeemed.
IIHS/HLDI (insurance companies) comes up with safety ideas, tests them, and then strongarms the auto manufacturers into making changes. These changes make the vehicles cost a lot more first there is the offset frontal impact. Then after the manufacturers catch up with that issue, IIHS comes up with a small overlap offset frontal crash test. Don’t forget the side impact tests, rear view cameras, adaptive cruise control, ABS, traction control, blind spot monitoring, automatic braking, and I’m sure there are others.
I’m not making value judgements on anything I listed, just pointing out that there are a lot of safety components on cars these days. Some people think many of them are not needed, and others think there aren’t enough. I imagine most of these people are rational, thoughtful people but have different opinions on when enough is enough. That’s what I mean when I suggest that it isn’t easy to define what I say ressonable and cost effective. IIHS wants it all and more. The more the car costs, the higher your insurance and the more money they make.
You can say it’s easy, but that’s only true as long as everyone thinks the way you do on this subject. I’m sure we can find lots of the usual suspects around here that disagree with your list of must-have safety features.
