They’re not all that independent, though. They just have a different special interest to follow. They aren’t interested in design compromises - they just want the “safest car possible” to reduce their insurance payouts.
Well, here’s the thing – we could get some Formula 1 engineers together and have them make us a road car that would survive a head-on with a semi. After all, they do the equivalent every day with the race cars - those things can often hit the wall at 200 mph and the driver only gets hurt when he bangs his fist on the wheel to vent his frustration. And that’s in a much smaller car with an open cockpit.
But then your Chevy Malibu would cost about 20 million dollars.
It’s all about tradeoffs. Frankly I think cars have gotten to the point where they’re safe enough from a structural standpoint. If we want to enhance vehicle safety further, we should demand more intensive driver training and testing, and insist that drivers be retested periodically to make sure they haven’t picked up dangerous habits. And drivers caught texting and driving should spend some time in jail, because the current system of occasionally fining them isn’t working, and they’re killing people.
Banning giant SUVs wouldn’t hurt either.
But interestingly, you’ll often find that the people who get all twisted that a vehicle didn’t pass an insurance industry crash test will also get all twisted if you suggest that they have to learn how to drive well before getting a license, or that they should have to continuously prove that they still know how to drive throughout their driving career, or that people shouldn’t be driving 19 foot behemoths as daily drivers.
So they want safety, as long as they don’t have to do anything about it themselves, which is honestly kind of stupid.
Show me where the IIHS is saying that. All they are saying is here’s a list of cars that meet our highest safety standards. And these are the vehicles that don’t. You the consumer have the choice to pick what you want.
I think you’ll find that very few people actually take the time find out how well any vehicle did in the IIHS testing.
Lots of cars have optional headlights these days. Halogen base, LED with certain option packages (used to be HID, but I think everyone’s going with LED now).
There are no absolutes, but yes, it can be a bad thing if they go too far. As an example, if you have an uncontrolled intersection where people are speeding through and creating a danger that a kid will get run over, you can make one of several choices: Do nothing, Put in a stop sign, Put in a stop light, Bulldoze the intersection.
That’s a continuum of increasingly effective safety measures for the intersection, but while the last choice would be by far the safest, it would also be dumb, because that intersection is there for a reason and people need it to get where they’re going.
Same thing goes for car safety. We can have a car tomorrow that is nearly 100% survivable no matter what wreck it gets into, but it will look like a giant ball, weigh about 20,000 pounds, the driver will be in a suspension web that takes an hour to get in and out of, and it will cost more than a private jet. There is such a thing as too many safety systems.
They aren’t saying that. That’s the problem. Someone should be saying that.
Put another way, I can spend 40 million dollars inventing a suit that will keep me alive inside a volcano or… I can just not go into a volcano. One’s a whole lot more practical and guaranteed than the other. We can spend millions of dollars and add hundreds of pounds of weight to our vehicles to make them even safer than they are now, or we could, you know, just learn how to drive so that we reduce the number of wrecks in the first place. The most survivable wreck is the one you avoid.
BMW is one. You can get regular halogens, or pay extra for LEDs, or pay a lot extra for laser headlights.
I don’t disagree that someone should be saying that…but that’s not the point. You’re making a strawman argument. You’re complaining about the IIHS testing by saying they aren’t saying anything about a bad intersection. One has NOTHING to do with the other.
There are two systems of safety in a car, well, in many aspects of life. Active safety and passive safety. With regards to cars, passive safety is about how well the car protects you when the accident happen. Active safety is about the drivers capability to foresee and avoid the accident. And a good “education” to get a drivers license plays a big role in the active part.