We've become increasingly safety obsessed and jammed more and more expensive and heavy safety technology into vehicles as the returns have diminished dramatically.
This is one reason why automobiles all look the same these days, with gigantic A-pillars, obscured windows views necessitating integrated cameras, and the universal "fat american" bulging sides appearance.
Visibility has really taken a nosedive. Over the last few years I've daily driven a 1962 Studebaker and a 1986 Ford Crown Victoria and both of them had incredible visibility compared to almost any car on the road today. Parallel parking was incredibly easy in the Studebaker especially, because you could actually see the back end of the car out the (massive) rear window.
I assume that's why, at 6'5", I can't see out the damn windshield anymore. I'm looking straight into the visor,and rear view mirrors keep getting lower. It's all really frustrating.
You gotta lay back super far, that's my secret. I was driving a e30 m3 the other day and was amazed on how much view the driver gets, it's like being in a fish bowl.
Yes, lay back. When I rent at the airport, I always try to get a VW Bug as they have decent visibility. VW has seats that adjust pretty low, then push it all the way back, and I'm good. That's fine if it were just me, but my kids could never fit behind me. Used to have a VW Corrado when I was young and single, and that was a good car for tall people, as long as you didn't need the back seat.
Next vehicle will be either a Tesla Model 3 (assuming they well be roomier with lack of engine) or a Mercedes Sprinter van. The later has good visibility and I can sit straight, which is good as my back is giving me trouble; I hate stooping to wiggle into cars.
Out of curiosity, did you ever try a PT Cruiser? Of course now that they're out of production, it's kind of moot, but I've heard a lot of good things about the way their seating is designed by my 6'3"+ tall friends.
I'm constantly looking for a clean Corrado, really want a v6 model. That and more 204z's. Yeah One day I put 2x2 together and realized German cars tend to have good head space, although if I flipped my buddies Miata over I'd loose all my hair....
I had a '94 (last year in the US). Had it up to 130 MPH with 4 people in it and the sunroof open, and it was silent. Man I loved that car. Now I'm married with 2 kids and drive a minivan. At least I sold it to another enthusiast.
Yeah bring raised on JDM cars, I was surprised about the small comforts of German vehicles. Perhaps you should consider a wagon and drop the mini-van... ;p
Another issue is that sweeping, curvy rooflines are in style right now. I'm 6'2" and I find that in a lot of newer cars I can barely fit in the drivers seat.
If you're looking at midsize sedans, FWIW, I found the Honda Accord and the Subaru Legacy to have the best headroom.
It should be noted however that there are two kinds of tall people: Those who are tall in the torso and those who are tall in the legs (and both). People should figure out which one they are when looking at vehicles. A vehicle with a lot of headroom won't do you any good if it is all in your legs.
As a resource for finding a vehicle which fits you...
Go to edmunds.com (or Google site:edmunds.com [vehicle] [year]), find the vehicle you're interested in, click "Features & Specs" then scroll down to "Interior Measurements." Of particular interest are "FRONT HEAD ROOM" and "FRONT LEG ROOM."
I recommend edmunds simply because they list these in one consistent easy to find format. A lot of vehicle manufacturers don't list these metrics at all on the specs page, you have to dive in a brochure to find it.
> "When we compare the data, we find that drivers could see more outside their vehicles in the 1980s than they can now," Dr. Matthew Reed, a research professor with the University of Michigan's Transportation Research Institute, said.
Way better medical care has to be part of that, too. Same with gunshot wounds -- in a lot of places, something which was 90% very negative patient outcome 30 years ago is 50+% survivable now, due to faster EMS, understanding of golden hour, and great trauma intervention.
Just being nitpicky, but halved from what to what? If we've spent hundreds of millions of dollars on more air bags and other crash engineering but only halved the number deaths from 50 to 25, it's probably not worth it...
Deaths per year in the US went from 53,000 in 1970 to 42,000 in 2000 despite a big increase in population and an even bigger increase in driving rates. The current number is about 33,000/year, which makes it still one of the top killers of young people.
If "Only" saving 25,000 people a year is not enough to get you excited, I have to ask if there is any human endeavor that you would consider to be worthwhile.
>increasingly safety obsessed and jammed more and more expensive and heavy safety technology
Is not a bad thing. Deaths from driving are bad and we should try and reduce them, whether via legal, social, or engineering means. To say the returns are diminishing says more about how little people drove in the past and how horrifically dangerous driving was.
A linear scale for a graph like that is terribly misleading. The graph looks almost flat lately, but that's just because it's relatively near zero. Blow that section up to give it some vertical room and it will tell a different story.
Edit: just to put some actual numbers on this, Wikipedia says that deaths per 100 million vehicle miles in the US was 1.07 in 2014, and 1.44 in 2004. That's an improvement of 25% in just the past ten years. You only have to go back 25 years to reach a fatality rate double that of 2014.
Yes, I acknowledge that, but it's important to bear in mind that costs for improvements are typically linear (or super-linear) so the cost/benefit of more safety has increased markedly.
I didn't expect my comment to provoke such a tremendous backlash.
Sure, all the low-hanging fruit is gone. It's a lot easier and cheaper to cut fatalities by X% by installing three-point seat belts in every car than it is to do it by building advanced stability control systems.
But still, the returns are still significant and the dangers are still huge. I'd guess that your tremendous backlash comes from using a deeply misleading graph as the foundation of your comment and from the strong implication that additional safety improvements are no longer worthwhile.
And that's where I would disagree with what is obviously an overwhelming majority: I don't think the returns, compared to costs, are significant and I don't think that the dangers are still huge. Modern cars are very, very safe and have been for years, and I think the industry should begin to prioritize other things (costs, simplicity, aesthetics, etc.) in some cases. I would be less obstinate if much of the safety equipment was optional, rather than required by law.
OTOH, given the absolute blow out that this comment took, I can see that mine is not a popular position. And I would be lying if I didn't admit that a lot of my animus comes from the fact that the vehicles I prefer (the 70-series landcruiser, the Defender 90) are not available in the U.S. due to safety restrictions.
Not to mention that the death rate is a tailing indicator for safety - there were a lot more deathtrap junkers from the 70s and 80s on the road in 2004 then there are in 2016.
That's a good point. You could freeze safety at the current model year and you'd still see significant improvements for another decade or two as older cars age out of the fleet.
> This is certainly dramatic, but it is important to realize that the majority of automobile safety improvements came before 1960
Uhh what? Incorrect.
In 1960, 20.147 per 100K population died, in 2013 10.345 per 100k population died. Approximately a 50% decline (9.802 actual) between the two periods.
In 1937, 29.357 per 100K population died, in 1960 20.147 per 100K population died. Approximately a 32% decline (9.21 actual) between the two periods.
So both as a % and in literal terms the delta between 1960 and today is greater than the difference between the worst year (1937) and 1960.
> We've become increasingly safety obsessed and jammed more and more expensive and heavy safety technology into vehicles as the returns have diminished dramatically.
But yet vehicles are lighter and cheaper today than they were in 1960 (adjusting for inflation). So even if this safety technology is increasing both price and weight (and I agree that it does), we're still in a very good place.
While reduction in deaths has slowed in the last ten years, we're just on the brink of moving into automated safety systems (e.g. auto-breaking) that will likely move things forward yet again.
Measuring automobile deaths per population is highly uninformative, because of the massive difference in exposure over time. People were driving way more in 1960 than 1937. If safety were constant, you'd expect the fatalities per population to also go way up. Fatalities per vehicle mile or passenger mile, while still not telling the whole story, is a much better measure.
> Fatalities per vehicle mile or passenger mile, while still not telling the whole story, is a much better measure.
And says the same thing, that safety has continued to improve dramatically since 1960.
But fundamentally if population bound statistics are unfair in one direction, miles driven statistics are unfair in the opposite.
I picked the statistic which actually makes it hardest to prove my point, and still proved my point. If I used miles driven I'd prove my point even harder.
I know. I am objecting to your reasoning, not your conclusion.
Edit: wait, how are mileage based statistics unfair in the opposite direction? The inaccuracy with those comes from inconsistent exposure to danger (i.e. city roads versus divided highways versus narrow rural roads) and inconsistent numbers of people per vehicle. It's really hard to say which way that inaccuracy goes, only that it exists.
> important to realize that the majority of automobile safety improvements came before 1960:
This is an absurdly false claim. Cars in the 60s had bias ply tires (which blew out frequently and had no traction), drum brakes (awful), single circuit brake systems that would fail if there was a leak, solid rear axles (tail happy), lap belts (if anything).
Old cars were several orders of magnitude more difficult and dangerous to drive. Airbags, ABS, crumple zones, traction/stability control, and radial tires have all massively improved the safety of driving.
Car safety has improved so much in the past 10 years that the NHSTA and IIHS have needed to make their tests more stringent because so many cars were getting perfect scores. A ten year old Camry would have a perfect score in 2006, but would likely fail a 2016 crash test.
What's so bad about drum brakes? I know they are more involved to work on, and have more parts.
But as far as safety, aren't they easier to activate, which is important if you don't have power assist brakes? (Say engine dies, so just didn't come with power brakes.)
You are correct, that's why they were originally used, but that's the only advantage they have over discs. Drums don't stop very well. There isn't much surface area for friction and they suffer from brake fade (overheating causing a reduction in braking capability).
Drums are cheaper, which is why they're still used, even if they're much more of a pain in the ass to maintain. Most of the stopping in a car's brake system comes from the front brakes, so a lot of manufacturers cheap out on the rears, even if it means losing a bit of braking power.
They're easier to activate because they're self-energizing (I'm sure Wikipedia has a handy diagram that explains). But drums don't stop as well (not an issue when you're on crappy bias-ply tires), and they tend to fade under repeated braking. They also loss stopping power in the rain more than discs do. Not as important, but I've found disc brakes to be easier to modulate as well.
There's no power assist on most motorcycle brakes. I've owned motorcycles with drum brakes. OMG, I'll take the disc brakes any day, power assist or no.
My wife and I recently finished an introductory auto mechanics class — which was an incredibly fun time and an excellent experience — and one of the recurring themes of the class was just how miserable, unreliable, and dangerous cars were ~50 years ago. This video is a good example of that; it's not just mileage or seat belts or airbags, it's everything from tires to engines to brakes.
Wish I could find an adult intro to auto mechanics class around here. That would be massively useful for everyone to learn but it seems like all anyone who already knows basic auto repair says is "YOU DON'T KNOW HOW TO DO THAT?!" with a sarcastic condescending tone, and I guess that attitude filters down to lack of education since it is obvious or whatever.
But on the positive note there is a 101 to gun safety class every two city blocks so I have that going for me...
You might want to pick up the Chilton's or Haynes manual for your vehicle and start from there. Most of these manuals will have a section describing how you perform basic maintenance on the vehicle.
What they don't teach you is the "tricks". Looking for an air leak using a spray bottle, putting anti-seize on engine bolts as you are reassembling engine parts (like an alternator attachment bolt!) or just how important correct torque and new fasteners are.
And that doesn't even begin to touch the true magic in having a large collection of chemicals. Know when to use DC-4, WD-40, 33MS, brake cleaner, contact cleaner, and of course, GOJO.
I got into auto repair when I was swindled by an incompetent/unscrupulous mechanic in Austin in the 90s. Haynes/Chilton were quite reasonable starting points to learn the basics. I also spent a lot of time on automotive newsgroups and forums, which is how I absorbed the tribal knowledge such as the anti-seize tip above. E.g. if you own a Honda, you can get excellent help troubleshooting its quirks on honda-tech.com. It is where I learnt how to troubleshoot a failing input-shaft bearing on a transmission and how to find a very cheap interchangeable replacement that got me going again.
It has been a fun journey and it is very nice to see through the utter nonsense most auto repair places spew. I would repeat that a community college course and/or Haynes is a good starting point and then it is off to the forum that caters to your car :).
> I would repeat that a community college course and/or Haynes is a good starting point and then it is off to the forum that caters to your car :).
To me, this is one of the most fascinating aspects of the internet. No matter your make or model, there is a dedicated forum for your car. And it's got plenty of active accounts.
I think that's a neat idea, but I personally would be nervous about smearing grease all over my tablet, or spilling fluids on it, or dropping it -- something that happens to almost every other tool at one point or another.
As a reference away from the garage, it would be cool, but I would still want something I would feel safe having by my side as I work on the car.
This is going to sound daft at first, but hear me out...
Car Mechanic Simulator 2015 on Steam is actually a reasonable, entertaining way to walk through the basics of auto repair. It will help you learn he names and functions of individual parts and systems as well as how they are interconnected, what they look like, their relative cost, and generally where they are. In the game you will, for example, start with real-life diagnostic codes and then troubleshoot from there, buying parts you hope will fix the issue.
After playing the game if you go to YouTube and search for your exact car (by year, make, and model), you'll find a bunch of repair videos. You'll now have the vocabulary and basic understanding to follow along with any common repair.
Also /r/justrolledintotheshop you discover a significant amount of information by looking at that stuff and dropping a comment asking what you're seeing (if somebody hasn't already done that, which has usually happened). The denizens of that subreddit are incredibly nice and the subreddit is halfway hilarious and terrifying: some people drive these things[0]… around you…
I find the attitude mentioned above annoying. Of course a ton of people do not understand these things. We make great cars today. So many of us really don't have to know.
It is a want to know in most cases. Share and share alike man.
My favorite book, even if you don't have a VW, is John Muir's "How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive: A Manual of Step-by-Step Procedures for the Compleat Idiot". It is great because it was written for someone with no mechanical experience, it assumes no specific knowledge, it is geared towards an older cars (air cooled VWs) that are much simpler than modern cars so you aren't thrown into the deep end, and is very funny and well written.
My favorite line from the book was something like "we'd have far less accidents if we were all strapped to the front of our cars like an aztec sacrifice." Which, while probably not the best approach to safety, has a kernel of truth that things that make us feel same may not make us safer, because they make us more willing to take risks.
The book begins with a great section on the theory of all the parts of the car from the 4 stroke engine to the differential to the brakes--how they work and why they're needed.
It's an absolute beauty, and all hand-drawn - none of this murky photo rubbish, it's the wonderful fusion of technical illustration and cartooning. When I draw, I aspire to that warm, friendly clarity.
A lot of people who know, jump in, get documentation on the car and start wrenching. I grew up fixing nearly everything I owned. Was cheap, and I learned a lot.
Today, it is actually a lot more fun and accessible. Videos of most repairs are online and easy to follow. I compare this to the first time I changed a transmission, or timing belt, and it's like the sci-fi future is here. Ask about it, and there you go!
Often, books did not even have that many photos. You had to reason through the repair.
My advice on this is to get some good tools and a place to work on the car. Clean it too. Working on clean cars is fun. Poor tools and a dirty car can be hell.
Then, fix your car, upgrade it, or get a fun project car, maybe one you thought was cool as a kid.
Most anyone can work on 90's and older cars. Newer ones do still offer a lot of opportunities, but sometimes are tough, due to all the advanced controls in place.
The skill I got as a kid means I can get a 500 dollar beater, size it up, and be driving it regularly for a few weekends of work. It came in handy during hard times once in life. It still does when on camping adventures. I've done some crazy stuff to get vehicles home! Good times. (Not so good actually, but seeking adventure sometimes means finding it.)
Get on Youtube and Google and search for '{car make & model} {repair}" - you might be surprised what you find. There's a lot of online forums for specific cars, and a lot of people posting repair videos on Youtube.
It also helps if you have an old beater to work on so that you can take your time and you don't end up messing up your daily driver car.
Last summer I successfully replaced a clutch by myself on an old car of mine soley based on videos and walkthroughs I found online. It took forever and was probably an order of magnitude more difficult than any automotive repair I'd ever attempted prior to that, but I did it.
The city/town runs a series of adult education classes, usually 10-12 weeks. There's a huge range of subjects (cooking, dancing, languages, painting, smithing) and while we're often too busy to do more, it's absolutely worth it.
If you have a basic understanding of tools and fasteners, and even a $100 toolkit from Home Depot, start by changing the brake pads on your car. Youtube or Google search for a video and/or writeup of changing the brakes on your particular installation. Many common cars have a user-generated video of the procedure.
I know that sounds insanely risky, but if you don't end up with parts left over, and everything seems like it went together correctly, the chances of screwing something up are very remote, and the chances of screwing it up in a way that won't be obvious in the first mile of driving are even more remote.
Anyone in the Cambridge, MA area who has a very flexible schedule and wants me to put an eyeball on them while they do their brakes, I'm willing (but scheduling is often a bear).
I would suggest this even before taking a class at the community college. I think you're going to be taking the class with peers who have spent at least 50 hours with a wrench in their hand growing up. You are going to learn more (or at least I would learn more) if you have some of the basics and have experience with the basic hand tools.
Coincidentally, I tried to do my own brakes when we lived in Somerville, but finding a place to do the work was a big problem. I ended up driving out to a friend on a farm out by Concord, but it's a huge hassle to not be able to do it in your own garage with all your tools at hand.
Much of Cambridge and Somerville are parallel street parking only, which makes it impractical to change your brakes with street traffic passing by.
(If the off-street parking that you have is required by zoning, as opposed to optional, you are prohibited by Zoning article 6.21 from doing non-emergency repairs in such a space. This applies mostly to condo and apartment developments, and not to most single-family residences.)
Been doing all repairs on my cars all my life――if only practical and doable in a parking spot. Learned from repair manuals and mostly by disassembling and reassembling myself. Using outdoors space is a bit limited with fluids, when working underneath the car, and for longer repairs. But because I really like doing mechanical work and because I also want to avoid becoming a bitter old man who never got to do enough fun stuff beyond coding I bought a private garage with enough space for installing a car lift. I can then do multi-day repairs and enable myself to do practically anything I ever want on my cars. And yes, to maintain my motorcycle as well. Yeah, it's a bit of an investment but as a city-dweller I'm not able to enjoy the benefit of a regular garage in a detached house.
Unlike the rest of the car, brakes are designed from the beginning to be replaceable. This makes them much easier to work on, and as long as you don't forget to insert the pads it's pretty obvious if you did it right.
Do one side at a time, so you have the other side to copy in case you are not sure at any step.
You'll need to learn how to lift a car, never work under a jack, always jack stands, and always two stands. (More stands, or stands plus the jack "as backup" is actually LESS safe! Stands are safe because in order to tip over you have to raise the car against gravity - you don't want anything that reduces the full weight of the car against the stands.)
Growing up, we had a late 60's Dodge station wagon. It was pretty much the definition of "unsafe" - the interior was made of hard metal surfaces, loose steering & suspension, and no crash engineering at all. But it was the first family car that came with disc brakes, and that's why Dad bought it.
Later, they bought a mid 80's Pontiac 6000, and while it had disc brakes, GM hadn't increased the size of the brake rotors to accommodate the change from asbestos brake pad material, so it had huge brake fade and panic stops really did result in driver panic. Not a fun car to drive.
As part of getting my driver's license you have to spend half a day at a class on driving risks, you get to spend some time driving in really slippery conditions, getting the feel for ABS and traction control.
They also showed some actual wrecks so you could see what happens and how they break, and they really stressed that even though it might be tempting to buy a cheap, old, used car, DO NOT buy something built before the year 2000, stay on this side of the millennium, older cars are dangerous!
They're not all equally bad. Even in the 1960s, for example, Mercedes had introduced unibodies, collapsible steering columns, disc brakes, crumple zones, side-impact reinforcement. A lot of what became standard, mandatory safety features were pioneered by Mercedes and a few other companies that have always had safety as a concern.
Citroën actually introduced the first production unibody in 1935 - Ford in 1936, and Nash in 1941. 1949 Chrysler Imperial was the first car standard with Disc Brakes, Mercedes can however take credit for the crumple zone, and probably side-impact reinforcement.
Unibody as a safety feature is more complex, Unibody cars are not inherently safer (quite arguably a perimeter frame may be safer for some collisions), and until recently they were often heavier for the same size car - it wasn't until the late 70's-80's where a unibody could be lighter than a BOF car because of enhanced computer modeling - generally a unibody however is safer than the X-frame as exemplified in this video.
The Malibu is quite big on the inside. I owed an Aura (same platform) and there was enough room in the back that they could have easily had reclining rear seats. It had a good 28' of leg room with me driving.
A lot of space is used up on safety equipment. As one small example A-Pillars (at the edges of the windshield) are very large to incorporate the safety cage, rollover protection, and airbags. [1] This leads to a weird problem where the car is very safe in a crash, but slightly more likely to get in an accident due to visibility issues.
There are existing lane change warning systems for rear visibility, I expect there will soon be forward sensing systems as well; and of course SDCs are coming as well.
Seats also take up a significant amount of room - partly to safety considerations, but also a bit to lazy design.
You assessment is perhaps a bit harsh, but I don't think it deserves the downvotes. The Chevy Malibu is not a small car. In Europe the design was sold as Opel Vectra/Signum which was actually a "large family car" by European standards. It's the largest sedan that GM sold under the European Opel/Vauxhall badges; to get a bigger car, you got a minivan.
Reminds me of the classic Chevrolet Corvairs which were equipped with a single-piece steering column that could impale the driver in a head-on collision.
Was by no means confined to the Corvair. Early Mustangs (65-most of 67) had non-collapsible steering columns (and 65s didn't come with even lap belts standard [federal mandate in 66]).
65s also had single-circuit brakes, meaning the leak of just one wheel cylinder (not entirely uncommon) could render the entire braking system inoperative, leaving you heading towards a collision with no brakes, a one-piece "Spear-o-matic" steering column and no lap belts. Ugly, so two of the first mods I did to my '65 were dual-circuit braking system and lap belts. (The steering column change is unfortunately quite involved.)
IIRC it was also common for the engine to follow the steering column into the passenger compartment to polish off the driver and break the passenger's legs in case they hadn't been maimed yet.
I wish that that someone did some tests between old and new software, I bet uptime of old software/hardware would be higher than our current tech stack.
I don't know about uptime, but most of the new programming languages have no undefined behavior (a Java program always behaves as a Java program whatever your bugs are), while most of the old languages do have undefined behavior (even Ada has garbage-initialized variables.) Hardware-wise, there's memory protection and virtualization, whereas old Unix, Windows, etc. all let you crap all over any piece of memory because there was no efficient way to prevent arbitrary machine code from doing that. Security also improved tremendously, in relative terms.
So we're far from unhackable, never-crashing software, but then cars, too are still relatively dangerous, just much less so than they used to be.
(Now one interesting thing that I wonder about, though, with all those thank yous going out to the government, Ralph Nader and other deities in sibling comments, is just how reliable this crash test is; meaning, what happens if you try other angles, which are not in the standard test.)
>I don't know about uptime, but most of the new programming languages have no undefined behavior (a Java program always behaves as a Java program whatever your bugs are), while most of the old languages do have undefined behavior (even Ada has garbage-initialized variables.)
BTW, Java does have implementation-defined or unspecified behavior (for instance, using the same objects from different threads without proper coordination), but there's much less of it and it's easier to avoid.
That's true, and it's true of most languages, and unfortunately people trip over it even when they can totally avoid it by hiding threads behind other abstractions. So yeah, silly of me to have forgotten it.
That said, AFAIK language-level invariants in Java (and Python, etc.) cannot be violated by the lack of thread safety; meaning, you can still inspect every live object and see its state. Program-level invariants might go to heck, for sure. So what I should have said is more along the lines of "memory safety" than "lack of undefined behavior"; I'm not sure what the shortest and most precise way to put it is, though. (It does not quite end with memory safety but it doesn't quite get to lack of undefined behavior, either.)
Much of development and the stack has become better. I still remember writing code in Pascal when I'd been much younger when my program would randomly stop working. Eventually I would insert an empty line between two lines of code and suddenly it'd work again.
A lot of work has been put into tools and our general ability to write better code (although whether we do so or not is a different issue).
Also consider line counts, driven by functionality demands. A Unix from the 1970s has a kernel with maybe <10KLOC? Linux is more like 15000KLOC. If due to bugs, Linux crashes twice as often as that old Unix, then on a line for line basis, each Linux line is still 750x more reliable on average than the old Unix lines.
Not sure, but Volvo likes to talk a lot about how they invented a lot of safety improvements and implemented things first. I believe they invented the 3-point harness, as well as the whiplash protection system.
Usually, it seems like things get invented by someone else first and sold to safety-minded consumers and then mandated by the government when they realize what a great idea it is. The rearview camera is a good example of this: lots of cars have them to improve visibility, and there's lots of data showing how many kids and pets get backed over every year, so the US government has mandated that all new cars have them by 2018. My new car has one, and honestly, I'm not sure how I ever got along without it now. Aside from kids, it makes backing up so much easier it's ridiculous; I can easily back into very tiny spaces leaving 12 inches of space behind my rear bumper, something I could never do with my previous smaller cars. That makes it easier to do parallel parking for instance.
They didn't invent any safety features, but the basic research done by Colonel John Stapp in the field of human g-force tolerance was fundamental to the design of seat belts and restraint systems, and was later used in passenger car design.
His research was intended to increase pilot survival for when they had to eject from a damaged plane. This was at the dawn of the jet age, and previously a pilot would just open the canopy and jump out. At jet speeds that wasn't possible, so ejection seats were built. The problem was: How fast should the seat accelerate to get him out of the plane? If it killed the pilot with excessive g's, it wasn't much of a safety system...
Only later was his research used to design restraints, and also create the instrumented crash test dummies that are used in automobile crash tests.
There are videos on Youtube of the early crash tests that were performed - they're rather comical to today's eyes. But they were serious business that was top secret - the car companies didn't want it to get out that their cars could crash and harm their customers (despite everyone knowing someone who was in an auto accident). Compare that to the publicity of the Ad Council's PSAs from the late 80's with crash test dummies Vince and Larry, with the tagline "You Could Learn A Lot From a Dummy". Big change in attitudes.
The IIHS is a private organization motivated by "greed" and funded by the insurance industry. Yet it's not surprising to see people coming in here and jumping on the opportunity to credit government for their work. Why is that do you think? Nothing in the video brought up government, but multiple people have claimed that this is the work of government.
The reason this is the case, near as I can tell, is that for the modern leftist government is a god. Statism is a religion.
Even when government is the cause of the problems, people so often turn around and want more government to fix them.
Yes, it's because modern leftists think government is a god, and couldn't possibly be because they're familiar with the history and think that government regulations have pushed up the standards for crash safety.
To add a personal perspective, when I got my first car in 1970, there were about 50,000 deaths per year for 200 million people. We were driving 75 - 80 on the interstates in the midwest on bias-ply tires with drum brakes and solid rear axles. Despite more than a 50% increase in population, total fatalities are under 35K/year, and trending down. By 2013 (the last year in wikipedia), the fatality rate was 2.5X lower than 45 years earlier.
There is a whole car-culture set around rebuilding these cars to factory spec, but there was a reason people were putting disc brakes from a '75 in a '56. Dual brake (front & rear) was not a mandatory thing until '69.
It's probably a project car from someone who loves immaculate interiors but has some serious engine trouble. Just guessing. There's a complete working model for sale right now for $39,000.
If you saw this video almost 7 years ago there's really nothing new here. At the risk of being redundant, it should have "[2009]" in the title. Here's an article from 2009 with aftermath pics, etc. showing the difference in occupant protection: http://www.autoblog.com/2009/09/26/pics-aplenty-iihs-reveals...
I do not doubt the premise of the video, but there appears to be a large rust cloud on impact. Did they use a structurally sound old car or did they help prove their point by using a rusted out car?
Your tax dollars at work. The auto industry fought most of the improvements that make that safety improvement possible. They fought seat belts. They fought air bags. They fought crumple zones. They lost.
Except Volvo, which was usually ahead of regulations on safety. They had each of those things before they were mandated.
Volvo's CEO has announced that they want to eliminate all deaths in Volvo cars by 2020. He also says that if a self-driving car has an accident, it's the manufacturer's fault and the manufacturer's financial responsibility.
The founder of the company was passionate about making and driving beautiful cars, and he succeeded and built a pretty impressive company on that. However, he didn't pay much attention to safety, and died in a car wreck.
His wife inherited the company, and instead of selling off the assets and retiring, decided to take the helm and begin producing the safest cars possible. Ever since, they've been on the leading edge of safety development. The cars weren't quite as pretty, but they didn't kill as many people.
Not true, neither of the founders died in a car accident.
Volvo had a very strong safety emphasis already in the '50s, introducing many firsts in the automotive safety field. In that decade they introduced shoulder belts as a world first and padded dashboard as an European first (Tucker had this already in '40s but only 51 cars were ever made).
If onre's comment doesn't suffice, your picture is the backside of a P1800ES. It was released in the early 70s. Before it, during the 60s, Volvo had started using 3-point seatbelts (front and back), padded dashboards, rear-facing child seats, crumple zones and head restraints.
A friend had a sporty two-seater Volvo P1800, and it had this exact seat belt clasp. It felt like something out of an airplane - solid, metal, no-nonsense - and it basically was, because the designer used to do ejection seats at Saab.
Until there's no human control available drivers will still have to have insurance. Even after that it'll take some fight to get auto companies to accept liability for failures instead of the 'driver' (or owner I guess since there's not really a driver in a fully self driving car). Rates for fully automatic cars should be drastically lower though once the insurance companies have a way to gauge the risk of crash for each car.
If I had to guess there will probably be tests like the Institute for Highway Safety does but to test autonomous car software, maybe mostly simulated so they can run a huge number of tests again and again (a Matrix-for-Cars).
IMHO, the big problem is in statutorily capping damages. Generally, punitive damage increase with the depth of the pockets of party responsible for the death. That makes it hard to insure. But once it can be capped and precisely accounted for, SDC makers could easily self-insure and take over insurance cost from riders.
I don't understand what caps or punitive damages have to do with it. Most venues don't have caps at all, and only rarely does an insurer get stuck paying for punitive damages. In the real world these things have little effect on the amount of money insurance companies actually pay, so I don't see why they'd have much of any effect on underwriting.
>I don't understand what caps or punitive damages have to do with it. Most venues don't have caps at all, and only rarely does an insurer get stuck paying for punitive damages.
Yeah, that's the problem; it means you can't insure away the problem, and each jury gets told to slap on a high enough penalty to ensure the SDC maker "never does it again", and you know how that goes.
The problem isn't the insurer's solvency, but the SDC maker's.
One venue that has caps, for similar reasons, is vaccines. Because vaccines are safe and necessary, we need a way to ensure vaccine makers exist and aren't sued to bankruptcy over the inevitable few deaths, so there's a special system for ensuring compensation of the victims, and makers can accurately set aside a known quantify of money for those deaths.
Cars can be leased with an operating lease that includes maintenance and insurance. This is common for businesses that lease cars and trucks. Businesses get a fixed cost known in advance, and the business doesn't face any unexpected costs. That arrangement would work for self-driving cars.
This video and test were done by the IIHS, an insurance-industry funded groups. The DOT crash tests are lame; it took the IIHS to push offset-frontal crash tests like this. The Federal government thinks that all auto crashes are frontal head-on crashes with no offset whatsoever.
IIHS and European tests are far better, but as usual, the US standards are stupid and backwards, just like they are for vehicle lighting and everything else. The DOT requirement for those idiotic "sealed beam" headlights are what kept the fronts of cars looking so ugly for so long, while the Europeans had moved to better-designed halogen bulbs and housing long before but couldn't export them to the US.
In short this is a result of the principle-agent problem. Politicians can be influenced. The government has little time to get in, and when regulations are set they are rarely updated... meanwhile the IIHS helping insurers save money (by setting correct car insurance premiums) also sparked consumer demand for high safety ratings when shopping for cars.
This is very much the free market at work. Money (which people like to call "Greed") drives both consumers and insurers to find the scientifically best car. Insurers have more appropriate loses, and customers have fewer deaths (or a better safety level for their dollars spent).
The IIHS makes the knowledge about car safety much less asymmetric in the market.
The UL does a similar thing, and I think this is the model that is more effective.
It doesn't take an act of congress for the IIHS to come up with a new test and new standards as technology improves and new areas of risk are discovered!
Edit: I see my parent is being downvoted. He pointed out the basic facts of the situation, but since it was not sufficiently authoritarian he is being downvoted. I feel this site is anti-intellectual.
That is a narrative that (correct or not) explains U.S. car standards. But I'm pretty sure that, last time I was there, government and politicians exist in Europe. What's the explanation for regulation that (apparently, at least for the GP poster) works better?
I believe GP was not referring to video, but to the safety legislation leading to starkly improved safety performance of the 2009 vehicle (I thought their second line made this very clear)
and Saab, which was a point of contention when they were acquired by GM (Saab people insisted on safety, GM put profit first) and probably is the reason Saab (the original) is no longer
There was an episode of Top Gear where they dropped a Saab and BMW on their roof from 8 feet in the air. IIRC, the Saab survived, and was able to even open it's doors. The BMW was basically flattened.
Do you have examples of the auto industry fighting safety features? I used to own an early 70s Oldsmobile Toronado which was available with both ABS and airbags. A quick Google search suggests that Chrysler and Ford had similar braking systems in 1971, possibly even better. ABS was not required by US law until 2011. 40 years after the US domestics first offered it.
I believe Ford made a big deal out of their padded dashboards in the 1950s as well but I would have to dig up references to that.
While Volvo has a great safety record they are not even close to the only manufacturer with a history of adding safety features to their cars. Safety is good business, the US domestics have known this for decades.
Before Ralph Nader was the face of the Green Party and the the 2008 darkhorse candidate in the 2008 election, he was the bane of the automotive industry. Check out his book Unsafe at Any Speed.
GM's response to the aforementioned? One of petulance and cowardice. They had to be hauled into Congress, kicking and screaming of course, before anything was done.
"Top Ford Motor Company executives went so far as to arrange a meeting with President Nixon to plead against a federal regulation that would have required air bags in all cars, starting with 1973 models. The meeting had the desired effect: Mr. Nixon ordered the regulation quashed. Eleven years after the 1971 meeting, a transcript from secret Oval Office tapes disclosed the conversation."
I believe the Toronado air bags might have been offered just to provide a tool to say consumers did not want them.
Earlier on, they also fought seat belts. Then later, they fought for state laws mandating seat belt use by drivers, just so they could say the airbags were not necessary in the presence of seat belts. And a bunch of other stuff. Classic cartel behavior.
I don't even understand their logic. Why not simply ask the government to ban or restrict the use of old cars without those safety features, after a short transition period? That would boost sales by forcing motorists to upgrade. Emission regulations in Europe work that way and they are a boon for the auto industry.
I said that auto companies could pursue their self-interest by turning regulations to their advantage, rather than opposing them. I didn't say they would embrace environmentalism in the truest depth of their hearts. Accepting emission standards for the entire industry and then cheating on them is fully consistent for an actor driven by self-interest, as long as they think they won't get caught.
Given the obviousness of the above, the real question is how you came to make such a silly post. My best guess is that you simplified the positions into "companies accept emission standards = companies GOOD on environment, but VW cheating = VW BAD on environment", and that's how you saw a contradiction. Please take a bit longer to think your posts through.
I think they fought all these items not because they didn't want to sell them, but because they would make more money selling them 10x more expensive to 20% of their customers.
Today the truck industry still fights any safety measures, rest times for drivers etc, the bar is way lower than for cars, or see the loopholes in safety for moving vans.
The blind zone around a truck is enormous, but manufacturers apparently don't want to do anything to improve this except adding mirrors, so the responsibility is laid on pedestrians and cyclist to stay out of the invisible blind zone.
And it's not just this. I've personally witnessed at least 2 Volvos on fire on Bangalore roads, although thankfully, there weren't any fatalities. The positioning of the fuel tank is reportedly flawed in these buses.
I wonder what prevented the people trapped from breaking the glass windows at the sides or back of the bus? I always imagined that would be the first action in case of fire. Missing safety hammers? Crushed until they could not move?
Seatbelts and not impaling the drivers head in ford's case was voluntary, McNamara introducing it in 1955. Many car manufacturers provided seatbelts since the 50s. Seat belts were only made mandatory in the mid-60s for most countries, 1968 specifically for the USA.
If car safety stayed at 1960 levels, there would be about 60,000 car deaths per year. Valuing a human life at about $5 million, those 30,000 extra deaths would have an economic cost of $150 billion per year.
It would be a lot worse than that, actually. In 1960 there were about 720 billion vehicle miles traveled in the US, and these days it's about 3 trillion, an increase of a bit over 4x. In 1960 there were about 36,000 traffic fatalities, so given a bit over 4x exposure you'd see about 150,000 traffic fatalities per year today. That's about 120,000 or $600 billion.
It looks to me like Consumer Reports did an awful lot of cherry-picking of the data in that video.
First, it looks to me like they made the collision happen at the max speed the Malibu could tolerate without collapsing the Malibu's passenger compartment. A slower collision might have been less catastrophic to the antique. A higher speed might have been catastrophic to the Malibu.
Second, they picked an old car built before seatbelt introduction and emphasized that aspect.
Third, they picked an accident type -- frontal offset -- which recent modern cars have been specifically engineered to handle.
Fourth, note how carefully the video is edited so that you cannot see the right side of the antique post-crash either overhead or from the side. The editors didn't want to show anything that would detract from their chosen message.
Modern cars really are a lot safer and way more reliable than cars when I was a kid, and I'm grateful for it. When my wife got pregnant, the first thing I did was sell my 69 Chevy Nova because I felt that to be responsible for my child, I needed to take care of my life by driving a safer car. All that said, it irks me that Consumer Reports treated the production and editing of this film as a propaganda exercise instead of a straight-up tell-the-facts documentary.
It's also a surprisingly common accident type, and the speeds picked are typical for this accident type too - you may not see it because you live in a city, but in rural places with lots of two-lane roads its surprisingly common for a high-speed frontal offset collision to happen.
>Second, they picked an old car built before seatbelt introduction and emphasized that aspect.
How is that cherry picking? Seat belts are a huge safety improvement and it's a difference that applies to all old/new car comparisons, not just the specific old car they chose.
>Third, they picked an accident type -- frontal offset -- which recent modern cars have been specifically engineered to handle.
Why do you think they were specifically engineered to handle those accident types? They must be common enough to warrant the engineering expense to protect against it.
1) All the tests they do happen at a defined speed, for the front overlap it's 40 MPH [1] which it looks like the video was doing. Can't really fault them for using their standard tests.
2) It was to show how much better cars have gotten in the 50 years (1959 to 2009 when the video was produced) seat belts didn't even appear as a standard fitting on a car until 1958 on a Saab.
3) New cars are engineered to handle all the types of crashes that the IIHS tests for. I don't see your point.
4) The newer car had basically no damage on the opposite side and I doubt the older car did better than the 2009. It's not shocking at all that the non involved side of the car wouldn't take much damage. They don't even track the movement on that side of the car during their tests.
There's a lot of obsession with head-on collisions in regards to safety but there are two things commonly forgotten about. The ability to stop quickly and rollover risk.
I've always felt a large family sedan like a Ford Taurus was probably the overall safest thing you could drive. Decent stopping distance, low rollover risk and lots of crush zone room for modern engineering to absorb impact.
We've made enormous progress in holding up under collision, but giant steps back in collision avoidance. I remember around 5 years ago seeing a concept for the "car of the future" as basically a glass box optimizing visibility. In fact we've done the opposite: high beltlines, low and elongated roofs, rear visibility and rear side windows approaching zero.
Volkswagen makes just about the only high-quality compact in the neighborhood of $20k that you can actually see out of. Mazda3, Prius, Elantra, etc. are seemingly part of a concerted effort to make the greatest amount of damage possible to the driver's situational awareness. Why? Just so they can sell you the blindspot monitoring options?
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 213 ms ] threadhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_safety_in_the_U...
We've become increasingly safety obsessed and jammed more and more expensive and heavy safety technology into vehicles as the returns have diminished dramatically.
This is one reason why automobiles all look the same these days, with gigantic A-pillars, obscured windows views necessitating integrated cameras, and the universal "fat american" bulging sides appearance.
I have a 2011 Crown Victoria - which compared to a 2011 Charger is night and day difference.
Next vehicle will be either a Tesla Model 3 (assuming they well be roomier with lack of engine) or a Mercedes Sprinter van. The later has good visibility and I can sit straight, which is good as my back is giving me trouble; I hate stooping to wiggle into cars.
If you're looking at midsize sedans, FWIW, I found the Honda Accord and the Subaru Legacy to have the best headroom.
It should be noted however that there are two kinds of tall people: Those who are tall in the torso and those who are tall in the legs (and both). People should figure out which one they are when looking at vehicles. A vehicle with a lot of headroom won't do you any good if it is all in your legs.
As a resource for finding a vehicle which fits you...
Go to edmunds.com (or Google site:edmunds.com [vehicle] [year]), find the vehicle you're interested in, click "Features & Specs" then scroll down to "Interior Measurements." Of particular interest are "FRONT HEAD ROOM" and "FRONT LEG ROOM."
I recommend edmunds simply because they list these in one consistent easy to find format. A lot of vehicle manufacturers don't list these metrics at all on the specs page, you have to dive in a brochure to find it.
'Why Left Turns Are So Deadly' http://www.wnyc.org/story/left-turns/
> "When we compare the data, we find that drivers could see more outside their vehicles in the 1980s than they can now," Dr. Matthew Reed, a research professor with the University of Michigan's Transportation Research Institute, said.
>increasingly safety obsessed and jammed more and more expensive and heavy safety technology
Is not a bad thing. Deaths from driving are bad and we should try and reduce them, whether via legal, social, or engineering means. To say the returns are diminishing says more about how little people drove in the past and how horrifically dangerous driving was.
Edit: just to put some actual numbers on this, Wikipedia says that deaths per 100 million vehicle miles in the US was 1.07 in 2014, and 1.44 in 2004. That's an improvement of 25% in just the past ten years. You only have to go back 25 years to reach a fatality rate double that of 2014.
I didn't expect my comment to provoke such a tremendous backlash.
But still, the returns are still significant and the dangers are still huge. I'd guess that your tremendous backlash comes from using a deeply misleading graph as the foundation of your comment and from the strong implication that additional safety improvements are no longer worthwhile.
OTOH, given the absolute blow out that this comment took, I can see that mine is not a popular position. And I would be lying if I didn't admit that a lot of my animus comes from the fact that the vehicles I prefer (the 70-series landcruiser, the Defender 90) are not available in the U.S. due to safety restrictions.
I think every person who lives because of those diminishing returns is grateful for any progress made.
Uhh what? Incorrect.
In 1960, 20.147 per 100K population died, in 2013 10.345 per 100k population died. Approximately a 50% decline (9.802 actual) between the two periods.
In 1937, 29.357 per 100K population died, in 1960 20.147 per 100K population died. Approximately a 32% decline (9.21 actual) between the two periods.
So both as a % and in literal terms the delta between 1960 and today is greater than the difference between the worst year (1937) and 1960.
> We've become increasingly safety obsessed and jammed more and more expensive and heavy safety technology into vehicles as the returns have diminished dramatically.
But yet vehicles are lighter and cheaper today than they were in 1960 (adjusting for inflation). So even if this safety technology is increasing both price and weight (and I agree that it does), we're still in a very good place.
While reduction in deaths has slowed in the last ten years, we're just on the brink of moving into automated safety systems (e.g. auto-breaking) that will likely move things forward yet again.
And says the same thing, that safety has continued to improve dramatically since 1960.
But fundamentally if population bound statistics are unfair in one direction, miles driven statistics are unfair in the opposite.
I picked the statistic which actually makes it hardest to prove my point, and still proved my point. If I used miles driven I'd prove my point even harder.
Edit: wait, how are mileage based statistics unfair in the opposite direction? The inaccuracy with those comes from inconsistent exposure to danger (i.e. city roads versus divided highways versus narrow rural roads) and inconsistent numbers of people per vehicle. It's really hard to say which way that inaccuracy goes, only that it exists.
This is an absurdly false claim. Cars in the 60s had bias ply tires (which blew out frequently and had no traction), drum brakes (awful), single circuit brake systems that would fail if there was a leak, solid rear axles (tail happy), lap belts (if anything).
Old cars were several orders of magnitude more difficult and dangerous to drive. Airbags, ABS, crumple zones, traction/stability control, and radial tires have all massively improved the safety of driving.
Car safety has improved so much in the past 10 years that the NHSTA and IIHS have needed to make their tests more stringent because so many cars were getting perfect scores. A ten year old Camry would have a perfect score in 2006, but would likely fail a 2016 crash test.
What's so bad about drum brakes? I know they are more involved to work on, and have more parts.
But as far as safety, aren't they easier to activate, which is important if you don't have power assist brakes? (Say engine dies, so just didn't come with power brakes.)
Discs are probably better, but I don't think the safety gains for them are that significant.
There's no power assist on most motorcycle brakes. I've owned motorcycles with drum brakes. OMG, I'll take the disc brakes any day, power assist or no.
But on the positive note there is a 101 to gun safety class every two city blocks so I have that going for me...
It's how I learned.
And that doesn't even begin to touch the true magic in having a large collection of chemicals. Know when to use DC-4, WD-40, 33MS, brake cleaner, contact cleaner, and of course, GOJO.
It has been a fun journey and it is very nice to see through the utter nonsense most auto repair places spew. I would repeat that a community college course and/or Haynes is a good starting point and then it is off to the forum that caters to your car :).
To me, this is one of the most fascinating aspects of the internet. No matter your make or model, there is a dedicated forum for your car. And it's got plenty of active accounts.
Why do we not have tablet apps which allow you to see how everything fits together, how the drivetrain redistributes energy, etc?
I'd still love a wireframe view of my Jeep I could manipulate on my iPad.
As a reference away from the garage, it would be cool, but I would still want something I would feel safe having by my side as I work on the car.
Car Mechanic Simulator 2015 on Steam is actually a reasonable, entertaining way to walk through the basics of auto repair. It will help you learn he names and functions of individual parts and systems as well as how they are interconnected, what they look like, their relative cost, and generally where they are. In the game you will, for example, start with real-life diagnostic codes and then troubleshoot from there, buying parts you hope will fix the issue.
After playing the game if you go to YouTube and search for your exact car (by year, make, and model), you'll find a bunch of repair videos. You'll now have the vocabulary and basic understanding to follow along with any common repair.
[0] http://imgur.com/90AvmSL
I find the attitude mentioned above annoying. Of course a ton of people do not understand these things. We make great cars today. So many of us really don't have to know.
It is a want to know in most cases. Share and share alike man.
My favorite line from the book was something like "we'd have far less accidents if we were all strapped to the front of our cars like an aztec sacrifice." Which, while probably not the best approach to safety, has a kernel of truth that things that make us feel same may not make us safer, because they make us more willing to take risks.
The book begins with a great section on the theory of all the parts of the car from the 4 stroke engine to the differential to the brakes--how they work and why they're needed.
Today, it is actually a lot more fun and accessible. Videos of most repairs are online and easy to follow. I compare this to the first time I changed a transmission, or timing belt, and it's like the sci-fi future is here. Ask about it, and there you go!
Often, books did not even have that many photos. You had to reason through the repair.
My advice on this is to get some good tools and a place to work on the car. Clean it too. Working on clean cars is fun. Poor tools and a dirty car can be hell.
Then, fix your car, upgrade it, or get a fun project car, maybe one you thought was cool as a kid.
Most anyone can work on 90's and older cars. Newer ones do still offer a lot of opportunities, but sometimes are tough, due to all the advanced controls in place.
The skill I got as a kid means I can get a 500 dollar beater, size it up, and be driving it regularly for a few weekends of work. It came in handy during hard times once in life. It still does when on camping adventures. I've done some crazy stuff to get vehicles home! Good times. (Not so good actually, but seeking adventure sometimes means finding it.)
It also helps if you have an old beater to work on so that you can take your time and you don't end up messing up your daily driver car.
Last summer I successfully replaced a clutch by myself on an old car of mine soley based on videos and walkthroughs I found online. It took forever and was probably an order of magnitude more difficult than any automotive repair I'd ever attempted prior to that, but I did it.
That actually sounds like a pretty fun idea. The engineer in me always loves learning how to take apart more things and put them back together.
I know that sounds insanely risky, but if you don't end up with parts left over, and everything seems like it went together correctly, the chances of screwing something up are very remote, and the chances of screwing it up in a way that won't be obvious in the first mile of driving are even more remote.
Anyone in the Cambridge, MA area who has a very flexible schedule and wants me to put an eyeball on them while they do their brakes, I'm willing (but scheduling is often a bear).
I would suggest this even before taking a class at the community college. I think you're going to be taking the class with peers who have spent at least 50 hours with a wrench in their hand growing up. You are going to learn more (or at least I would learn more) if you have some of the basics and have experience with the basic hand tools.
(If the off-street parking that you have is required by zoning, as opposed to optional, you are prohibited by Zoning article 6.21 from doing non-emergency repairs in such a space. This applies mostly to condo and apartment developments, and not to most single-family residences.)
Unlike the rest of the car, brakes are designed from the beginning to be replaceable. This makes them much easier to work on, and as long as you don't forget to insert the pads it's pretty obvious if you did it right.
Do one side at a time, so you have the other side to copy in case you are not sure at any step.
You'll need to learn how to lift a car, never work under a jack, always jack stands, and always two stands. (More stands, or stands plus the jack "as backup" is actually LESS safe! Stands are safe because in order to tip over you have to raise the car against gravity - you don't want anything that reduces the full weight of the car against the stands.)
Later, they bought a mid 80's Pontiac 6000, and while it had disc brakes, GM hadn't increased the size of the brake rotors to accommodate the change from asbestos brake pad material, so it had huge brake fade and panic stops really did result in driver panic. Not a fun car to drive.
They also showed some actual wrecks so you could see what happens and how they break, and they really stressed that even though it might be tempting to buy a cheap, old, used car, DO NOT buy something built before the year 2000, stay on this side of the millennium, older cars are dangerous!
Unibody as a safety feature is more complex, Unibody cars are not inherently safer (quite arguably a perimeter frame may be safer for some collisions), and until recently they were often heavier for the same size car - it wasn't until the late 70's-80's where a unibody could be lighter than a BOF car because of enhanced computer modeling - generally a unibody however is safer than the X-frame as exemplified in this video.
There are existing lane change warning systems for rear visibility, I expect there will soon be forward sensing systems as well; and of course SDCs are coming as well.
Seats also take up a significant amount of room - partly to safety considerations, but also a bit to lazy design.
1. http://wardsauto.com/news-analysis/new-pillars-enhance-safet...
[1]https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Bel+Air,+Los+Angeles,+CA/Mal...
65s also had single-circuit brakes, meaning the leak of just one wheel cylinder (not entirely uncommon) could render the entire braking system inoperative, leaving you heading towards a collision with no brakes, a one-piece "Spear-o-matic" steering column and no lap belts. Ugly, so two of the first mods I did to my '65 were dual-circuit braking system and lap belts. (The steering column change is unfortunately quite involved.)
So we're far from unhackable, never-crashing software, but then cars, too are still relatively dangerous, just much less so than they used to be.
(Now one interesting thing that I wonder about, though, with all those thank yous going out to the government, Ralph Nader and other deities in sibling comments, is just how reliable this crash test is; meaning, what happens if you try other angles, which are not in the standard test.)
BTW, Java does have implementation-defined or unspecified behavior (for instance, using the same objects from different threads without proper coordination), but there's much less of it and it's easier to avoid.
That said, AFAIK language-level invariants in Java (and Python, etc.) cannot be violated by the lack of thread safety; meaning, you can still inspect every live object and see its state. Program-level invariants might go to heck, for sure. So what I should have said is more along the lines of "memory safety" than "lack of undefined behavior"; I'm not sure what the shortest and most precise way to put it is, though. (It does not quite end with memory safety but it doesn't quite get to lack of undefined behavior, either.)
A lot of work has been put into tools and our general ability to write better code (although whether we do so or not is a different issue).
Would you like to write a web-app in C?
Usually, it seems like things get invented by someone else first and sold to safety-minded consumers and then mandated by the government when they realize what a great idea it is. The rearview camera is a good example of this: lots of cars have them to improve visibility, and there's lots of data showing how many kids and pets get backed over every year, so the US government has mandated that all new cars have them by 2018. My new car has one, and honestly, I'm not sure how I ever got along without it now. Aside from kids, it makes backing up so much easier it's ridiculous; I can easily back into very tiny spaces leaving 12 inches of space behind my rear bumper, something I could never do with my previous smaller cars. That makes it easier to do parallel parking for instance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Stapp
Only later was his research used to design restraints, and also create the instrumented crash test dummies that are used in automobile crash tests.
There are videos on Youtube of the early crash tests that were performed - they're rather comical to today's eyes. But they were serious business that was top secret - the car companies didn't want it to get out that their cars could crash and harm their customers (despite everyone knowing someone who was in an auto accident). Compare that to the publicity of the Ad Council's PSAs from the late 80's with crash test dummies Vince and Larry, with the tagline "You Could Learn A Lot From a Dummy". Big change in attitudes.
The reason this is the case, near as I can tell, is that for the modern leftist government is a god. Statism is a religion.
Even when government is the cause of the problems, people so often turn around and want more government to fix them.
Markets work best when you can attach a profit mechanism to a worthy goal (or just the task at hand).
[1] http://www.curbsideclassic.com/automotive-histories/automoti... Search for "Jim Snell"
No one is safe from link rot.
Except Volvo, which was usually ahead of regulations on safety. They had each of those things before they were mandated.
Volvo's CEO has announced that they want to eliminate all deaths in Volvo cars by 2020. He also says that if a self-driving car has an accident, it's the manufacturer's fault and the manufacturer's financial responsibility.
When Volvo began making cars, they were very beautiful, artistically designed instant classics, like this one: https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/99/b5/39/99b539384...
The founder of the company was passionate about making and driving beautiful cars, and he succeeded and built a pretty impressive company on that. However, he didn't pay much attention to safety, and died in a car wreck.
His wife inherited the company, and instead of selling off the assets and retiring, decided to take the helm and begin producing the safest cars possible. Ever since, they've been on the leading edge of safety development. The cars weren't quite as pretty, but they didn't kill as many people.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/df/1988-199...
Volvo had a very strong safety emphasis already in the '50s, introducing many firsts in the automotive safety field. In that decade they introduced shoulder belts as a world first and padded dashboard as an European first (Tucker had this already in '40s but only 51 cars were ever made).
And ultimately decided to make the patent (US 3043625) license-free and open (essentially copyleft)
http://web.origin.volvocars.com/SiteCollectionImages/TopNavi...
A friend had a sporty two-seater Volvo P1800, and it had this exact seat belt clasp. It felt like something out of an airplane - solid, metal, no-nonsense - and it basically was, because the designer used to do ejection seats at Saab.
That's a claim that can change auto insurance big time.
If I had to guess there will probably be tests like the Institute for Highway Safety does but to test autonomous car software, maybe mostly simulated so they can run a huge number of tests again and again (a Matrix-for-Cars).
Yeah, that's the problem; it means you can't insure away the problem, and each jury gets told to slap on a high enough penalty to ensure the SDC maker "never does it again", and you know how that goes.
The problem isn't the insurer's solvency, but the SDC maker's.
One venue that has caps, for similar reasons, is vaccines. Because vaccines are safe and necessary, we need a way to ensure vaccine makers exist and aren't sued to bankruptcy over the inevitable few deaths, so there's a special system for ensuring compensation of the victims, and makers can accurately set aside a known quantify of money for those deaths.
Wrong.
This video and test were done by the IIHS, an insurance-industry funded groups. The DOT crash tests are lame; it took the IIHS to push offset-frontal crash tests like this. The Federal government thinks that all auto crashes are frontal head-on crashes with no offset whatsoever.
IIHS and European tests are far better, but as usual, the US standards are stupid and backwards, just like they are for vehicle lighting and everything else. The DOT requirement for those idiotic "sealed beam" headlights are what kept the fronts of cars looking so ugly for so long, while the Europeans had moved to better-designed halogen bulbs and housing long before but couldn't export them to the US.
This is very much the free market at work. Money (which people like to call "Greed") drives both consumers and insurers to find the scientifically best car. Insurers have more appropriate loses, and customers have fewer deaths (or a better safety level for their dollars spent).
The IIHS makes the knowledge about car safety much less asymmetric in the market.
The UL does a similar thing, and I think this is the model that is more effective.
It doesn't take an act of congress for the IIHS to come up with a new test and new standards as technology improves and new areas of risk are discovered!
Edit: I see my parent is being downvoted. He pointed out the basic facts of the situation, but since it was not sufficiently authoritarian he is being downvoted. I feel this site is anti-intellectual.
> Wrong.
>This video and test were done by the IIHS
I believe GP was not referring to video, but to the safety legislation leading to starkly improved safety performance of the 2009 vehicle (I thought their second line made this very clear)
and Saab, which was a point of contention when they were acquired by GM (Saab people insisted on safety, GM put profit first) and probably is the reason Saab (the original) is no longer
I believe Ford made a big deal out of their padded dashboards in the 1950s as well but I would have to dig up references to that.
While Volvo has a great safety record they are not even close to the only manufacturer with a history of adding safety features to their cars. Safety is good business, the US domestics have known this for decades.
The 1971 Oldsmobile Torornado brochure prominently features ABS and specifically calls out the safety features available in that year: http://www.lov2xlr8.no/brochures/olds/71toro/bilder/6.jpg
GM's response to the aforementioned? One of petulance and cowardice. They had to be hauled into Congress, kicking and screaming of course, before anything was done.
In general I think it's widely agreed that all businesses almost universally tend to oppose most forms of gov't imposed change.
"Top Ford Motor Company executives went so far as to arrange a meeting with President Nixon to plead against a federal regulation that would have required air bags in all cars, starting with 1973 models. The meeting had the desired effect: Mr. Nixon ordered the regulation quashed. Eleven years after the 1971 meeting, a transcript from secret Oval Office tapes disclosed the conversation."
I believe the Toronado air bags might have been offered just to provide a tool to say consumers did not want them.
Earlier on, they also fought seat belts. Then later, they fought for state laws mandating seat belt use by drivers, just so they could say the airbags were not necessary in the presence of seat belts. And a bunch of other stuff. Classic cartel behavior.
For some reason, VW didn't see it that way wrt the diesel emissions.
Maybe you need to recheck your understanding of other motivations.
Given the obviousness of the above, the real question is how you came to make such a silly post. My best guess is that you simplified the positions into "companies accept emission standards = companies GOOD on environment, but VW cheating = VW BAD on environment", and that's how you saw a contradiction. Please take a bit longer to think your posts through.
VW has over 450,000 people - all viewing the world differently ( as demonstrated by VW's corporate actions differently)
Out of 450,000+, excluding the dealerships, not one agreed with you enough to blow the whistle.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBDyeWofcLY
http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Hyderabad/45-killed-as-b...
And it's not just this. I've personally witnessed at least 2 Volvos on fire on Bangalore roads, although thankfully, there weren't any fatalities. The positioning of the fuel tank is reportedly flawed in these buses.
Diesel doesn't burn in open air, without at least a wick and an existing source of ignition.
First, it looks to me like they made the collision happen at the max speed the Malibu could tolerate without collapsing the Malibu's passenger compartment. A slower collision might have been less catastrophic to the antique. A higher speed might have been catastrophic to the Malibu.
Second, they picked an old car built before seatbelt introduction and emphasized that aspect.
Third, they picked an accident type -- frontal offset -- which recent modern cars have been specifically engineered to handle.
Fourth, note how carefully the video is edited so that you cannot see the right side of the antique post-crash either overhead or from the side. The editors didn't want to show anything that would detract from their chosen message.
Modern cars really are a lot safer and way more reliable than cars when I was a kid, and I'm grateful for it. When my wife got pregnant, the first thing I did was sell my 69 Chevy Nova because I felt that to be responsible for my child, I needed to take care of my life by driving a safer car. All that said, it irks me that Consumer Reports treated the production and editing of this film as a propaganda exercise instead of a straight-up tell-the-facts documentary.
How is that cherry picking? Seat belts are a huge safety improvement and it's a difference that applies to all old/new car comparisons, not just the specific old car they chose.
>Third, they picked an accident type -- frontal offset -- which recent modern cars have been specifically engineered to handle.
Why do you think they were specifically engineered to handle those accident types? They must be common enough to warrant the engineering expense to protect against it.
2) It was to show how much better cars have gotten in the 50 years (1959 to 2009 when the video was produced) seat belts didn't even appear as a standard fitting on a car until 1958 on a Saab.
3) New cars are engineered to handle all the types of crashes that the IIHS tests for. I don't see your point.
4) The newer car had basically no damage on the opposite side and I doubt the older car did better than the 2009. It's not shocking at all that the non involved side of the car wouldn't take much damage. They don't even track the movement on that side of the car during their tests.
[1] http://www.iihs.org/iihs/ratings/ratings-info/frontal-crash-...
I've always felt a large family sedan like a Ford Taurus was probably the overall safest thing you could drive. Decent stopping distance, low rollover risk and lots of crush zone room for modern engineering to absorb impact.
It's also based on a Volvo platform. And very comfortable. XD
I have no idea why nobody likes them, but they are awesome 2nd owner cars.
Me: Thank goodness.
Volkswagen makes just about the only high-quality compact in the neighborhood of $20k that you can actually see out of. Mazda3, Prius, Elantra, etc. are seemingly part of a concerted effort to make the greatest amount of damage possible to the driver's situational awareness. Why? Just so they can sell you the blindspot monitoring options?