Any car is unsafe if driven by an idiot
To the pwrson that flagged my factual reply - Flagging should NOT be anomous - if you want to disagree let everyone know - don’t hide in the shadows
But - but - this one is a '62! It’s the “Unsafe at Any Speed” Corvair!
For the young among us, from a November 26, 2015 New York Times article:
On Nov. 30, 1965, “Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile” was published [by Ralph Nader]. The first sentence did not mince words: “For over half a century the automobile has brought death, injury and the most inestimable sorrow and deprivation to millions of people.”
The first chapter was aimed at the 1960-63 Chevrolet Corvair compact. Mr. Nader argued the rear-engine car had a suspension defect that made it easy for the driver to lose control and sometimes roll the car over.
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Nader was a douche - thankfully he was never voted in as a us president…
Want to have a look at “unsafe” vehicles today? Put a cell phone wielding idiot behind the wheel of an SUV and then check the factual single or multi vehicle accidents involving rollovers
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Because almost everybody has a daily experience of riding or driving a car, that risk is taken as the base by which many other risks are measured. The death rate of driving a car has steadily reduced since the introduction of the car as evidenced by this historical graph.
Before Ralph Nader, corporations took little responsibility for any harm that their products inflicted on consumers. Ralph Nader had a big role in making corporations assume more responsibility for making their products safe.
Nader’s book “Unsafe at Any Speed” criticized the entire auto industry for building unsafe cars. There were about a 100 suits against General Motors contending that the Corvair caused the death or injury of its occupants and Nader researched these suits to write the first chapter of his book.
GM retaliated against Nader by hiring private inspectors to try to tap his phone and hired prostitutes who tried to lure him into compromising situations. Nader filed a suit against GM for Invasion of Privacy and won a settlement of one half million dollars.
As a consequence of Nader’s lawsuit and activism, tort law was expanded to prohibit “overzealous surveillance” and Congress unanimously passed the 1966 National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act. The act established the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, marking a historic shift in responsibility for automobile safety from the consumer to the government. The legislation mandated a series of safety features for automobiles, beginning with safety belts and stronger windshields, and contributed to the steady decline automobile deaths relative to miles driven.
The Corvair was a neat car, designed to be the “American Porsche” with its flat six engine, good performance and sporty good looks. However that was where the engineering values ended and it took a national movement to get the auto companies (and other corporations) to start valuing consumer safety and engineering that into their products.
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So that was the beginning of the “Nanny State”.
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IF you can find a copy of “Unsafe at any speed”, it is a good read. I am “young” enough to have ridden in the 60’s era cars without seatbelts or padded dashboards. Ralph Nader deserves our praise as someone who relentlessly advocated for consumer safety. Police officers who had been trained for high speed driving that owned Corvairs said that they were unsafe and did not handle properly. Don’t know anyone who had a steel radio knob embedded in their skull? Thank Ralph Nader!
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If it is truly about “consumer safety” why are motorcycles or other “open” types of powered vehicles sold to the “public” then and today?
I’ve driven and currently own vehicles built in the 60s and 70s that have metal instrument panels and more that was “unsafe” - but then I know how to drive without the aid of modern gadgets - blind spot warning systems, anti collision sensors, back up cameras, anti lock brakes etc (that modern American consumers seem to actually need to drive from point A to B )
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well said - and sadly so very true!
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The positives of motorcycles are that they have much more performance than automobiles, are generally less expensive and are very popular within their group. Motorcycle riders are an active voting group and they have persuaded lawmakers that they want to ride motorcycles, even without helmets. This is despite the fact that while vehicular miles traveled by motorcycle make up only 0.7% of miles driven by cars and motorcycles, they make up 15% of all traffic deaths (source).
Apparently lawsuits against motorcycle manufacturers have not been successful as it was with automobile manufacturers. You cannot engineer a motorcycle to be as safe as a car and still have a motorcycle.
The agreement that has been worked out between advocates for motorcyclists and legislators is to try to confine the costs of treating injuries injuries and death to the motorcyclists. Motorcycle riders are required to carry bodily injury liability insurance so that the public does not have to bear the medical costs of treating injured motorcyclists.
How is performace a positive in regards to a conversation about safety?
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This I’d like to hear as well.
A definition of said “performance” would be nice as well.
Q: What do you call a bus load of personal injury / wrongful death lawyers going off a cliff?
A: A good start.
Being able to accelerate or brake more quickly can help one avoid or extricate oneself from dangerous situations, both of which I would consider “better performance” as well as conducive to safety.
Being able to make turns (ie better handling performance ) is similarly an asset.
None of these make up for bad driving…
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Fair enough, but the majority of ‘accidents’ is because one or more parties simply weren’t paying attention. Something that is much worse when using the performance of one’s vehicle to speed, weave in and around slower traffic, etc…
I also believe many of us may have either seen personally or seen the news reports about groups of motorcylists performing ‘tricks’ in traffic while filming themselves…
If performance were indeed an advantage, we would have seen similar increases in typical auto specifications. In short we would all be driving racing vehicles…
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I’m going to rephrase this slightly:
Most “accidents” are caused by inattentive drivers.
Some are also caused by people purposely doing stupid things (hereafter referred to as “asshats”).
Motorcycles are sometimes ridden by asshats.
Asshats also drive other vehicles.
If we were truly dedicated to safety, we would see vehicles equipped more like racecars. Instead we have vehicles dedicated to the ILLUSION of safety, and to avoiding lawsuiuts.
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Most of our vehicle safety rules have more to do with providing the Gubmint a means to fine (another word for tax) us. Speed limits, seat belt laws, etc… Some of these were justified, as @amacha suggested above, by the governments choice to pay (or more precisely force hospitals to pay) for the medical care of people who choose to not wear seatbelts, speed, weave in and out of traffic, etc… This is also partly because we choose to not hold people responsible for their actions, We have even decided to call these problems ‘accidents’ which imply that the parties are not really at fault for the collisions. In my 30+ years of driving, I have never hit another vehicle, but I have been rear ended four times, once by a cop. Those were not ‘accidents’…
In many areas of the country it is a ticket-able offence to travel at the posted speed limit in the left lane. In other words you are expected to facilitate letting people break the speed limit laws.
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I think the answer to that question was in the post that prompted it.
I don’t think this is true. It’s pretty clear that vehicles are much safer now than they used to be. That wasn’t done voluntarily by the car companies because they felt bad.
I do think the most dangerous part of a car is just above the driver’s seat but the engineering that goes into making cars safer is impressive and not an illusion by any means.
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Gotta ask - based on where radios are usually located in a given car( in relation to one’s head in a “driving” position(driving a car that is)) …if your head is that low, then you deserve the knob impalement for not keeping your eyes on the road…
I had assumed it was the kid, “riding the pony” (center armrest in the “deluxe” old front benches where they could fold down the armrest if there wasn’t someone sitting in the middle seat) while Dad made it buck by goosing the throttle…
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How do you explain laws requiring drivers to move to the right, even if they are traveling at the posted speed limit? If it is against the law to exceed the speed limit, why have a law that is designed to foster traveling faster then the speed limit?
If 55 mph speed limits were about safety, why have recent increases to as much as 80-85mph not resulted in statistically significant increases in traffic deaths, despite the roads themselves not being redesigned for the higher speeds.
As to tying the required safety improvements to actual safety improvements, I find the proposition unverified. The data isn’t as cut and dry as most people assume. For instance the push by Nader started in 62; however, despite all initial changes to the law, the death rate remained fairly constant until 1974. I would argue that the drop that year was a result of a large switch in consumer preferences from performance vehicles to gas economical vehicles. A trend that has continued to this day.
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