“ "Safety today is a luxury," writes Giugiaro. "Those who can afford a new car have a better chance of making it home alive."
Well, on the plus side, today’s luxury car features are tomorrow’s standard ones. I remember getting my first Lexus in 2006 and being wowed by the backup camera, they were new and only in luxury cars. Now every car has one.
It sounds deeply unfair that those with money are safer than those without, but if the benefits really do (for lack of a better phrase) trickle down we’re all better off in the long run.
I understand the point he's making: New cars are much safer than old cars, and the average person is driving a car that is 12 years old, while new cars are bought primarily by the wealthy. However, that seems like a natural consequence of two things that are very good for everyone. First, cars are lasting much longer than they used to, which lowers the lifetime cost of ownership. Second, cars have gotten much safer in the last fifteen years. As long as these trends continue, the safety gap will exist, but I think everyone would still prefer cars keep getting safer and more reliable.
I don’t know about this. Lots of luxury safety features are standard in budget cars today. Even if not standard, the dealers mostly stock vehicles with safety packages. Hyundais I see come with lane keeping and radar cruise and surround cameras and blind spot monitors and automatic braking and other stuff. These have made driving MUCH safer. For drivers and others.
The headline is misleading. Yes, a new luxury car is safer than one from 15 years ago, but both are infinitely safer than a car from the 1970s where seatbelts didn't exist and the crumple zone for the steering wheel column was your chest.
Well, new things are generally more expensive than second hand and retrofitting older things is more expensive than doing nothing.
So, water is wet.
I would also argue that it isn’t necessarily true in the strictest way of thinking, because personally if I had infinite money and technicians to maintain things I’d have 70s-90s sports cars before everything got massive and wide and heavy. That’s way more expensive and luxurious than a new Model 3 or something.
He rolled his Defender off a cliff. Maybe he was trying to adjust the volume on the radio with the "luxury" touchscreen on his luxury car? (If I could find an easily-linked photo of that dashboard, I'd include it.)
He’s a car designer who designed a lot of famous cars in the past and now he appreciates the focus on safety in modern cars. What I appreciate is that most of the original push for safety was done to market cars to Moms. Including seat belts and other features. Another fun fact is that the safer cars become, the faster they are driven, causing more risks outside of the car than in it. In Bulgaria the newly wealthy really expensive car owners and their children have caused tremendous suffering by wrecking their vehicles into other people at high speed and killing more and more. That included severing a bus this last week, killing a journalist several years ago, and many in between. The world is pulled by the brilliant and dragged by the stupidity of its most arrogant.
In the past, high-end safety always worked its way down. ABS, airbags, and backup cameras all started out as luxuries and became standard. The real question is whether this new wave of sensor-driven safety will do the same, or if the economics of software and subscriptions will freeze the gap in place.
This is why it always make me so mad about people who cry about how big vehicles are getting and why can’t we have the tiny thin dangerous vehicles from like 30 years ago instead.
Shut up. You’re just standing in the way of progress. Vehicles have to be bigger in order to be safer and more deformable, and they’re even safer for pedestrians. If they take up too much space on a road, build bigger roads. You cannot miniaturize automotive safety.
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[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 33.4 ms ] threadWell, on the plus side, today’s luxury car features are tomorrow’s standard ones. I remember getting my first Lexus in 2006 and being wowed by the backup camera, they were new and only in luxury cars. Now every car has one.
It sounds deeply unfair that those with money are safer than those without, but if the benefits really do (for lack of a better phrase) trickle down we’re all better off in the long run.
perhaps if the "modern" car wasn't such a shitshow the accident wouldn't have happened in the first place
So, water is wet.
I would also argue that it isn’t necessarily true in the strictest way of thinking, because personally if I had infinite money and technicians to maintain things I’d have 70s-90s sports cars before everything got massive and wide and heavy. That’s way more expensive and luxurious than a new Model 3 or something.
Shut up. You’re just standing in the way of progress. Vehicles have to be bigger in order to be safer and more deformable, and they’re even safer for pedestrians. If they take up too much space on a road, build bigger roads. You cannot miniaturize automotive safety.