I see cars on the road that are barely holding it together and probably wouldn't pass safety (or emissions) inspections if they were required to. The point is, there are other possibilities. First, safety features of older cars don't always work like new. Second, people might be driving old, unsafe, cars because it's all they can afford. Even in a recent trip to Italy, I was talking to someone complaining about this exact thing. This is not good.
I feel like there's very little engineering reasons why we can't, and it's mostly regulatory hurdles, that removes any economic incentives to do so.
I've recently read an article about what constitutes the right balance of regulations when it comes to aviation safety, and that while regulations have made modern planes extremely safe, overly stringent rules are also preventing planes from adopting modern safety features.
It was a $120 option, and most buyers opted out. A few years later they were made mandatory.
Besides that older cars are less safe because they are old not because they lack safety features.
That airbag 15 years old might or might not work. You have 300k kilometers driven there will be rust here and there.
The difficulty of modifying the body, is mostly a financial decision I think. The body is by-and-large optimized for assembly rather than repair and modifications - that's why body shops charge an arm and a leg.
> Crumple zones are model specific you can’t just change those without making new car.
Yep, and I think that's the problem. Cars should be designed in a way that you can make this kind of safety upgrades. There's little technical reason why with a more modular body and platform, the manufacturer can't design a new crumple zone for retrofit, run finite element analysis, and crash test it.
They may need to rethink fundamentally how mass-market cars are made, like using more fasteners instead of welding in the body and frame, or using plastic instead of sheet metal when they are not necessary, like for the body panels.
That old malfunctioning airbags should be able to be replaced easily.
But then it would incentivize the customers to keep their old cars instead of buying new ones.
My guess is you know nothing about it based on malfunctioning airbags that should be possible to be replaced easily.
Airbags are one action components so until they fire up you don’t have certainty. You might check electrical connections or replace them „just in case”. Yes airbags might not be good after 15 years and I don’t think anyone who is driving 15yo car has money or is willing to spend money on replacing them.
It's not an engineering problem. One could cut new holes in the front bumper of an old car, add forward-facing radar, tack on a display and a computer to drive it all, et voila! Now you have collision avoidance! Except even in volume, you've probably spent more than the car is worth (labor will be the killer, not hardware), or enough that the person whose economics dictate an older car can't afford the upgrade.
Lane keeping? I don't even want to think about what that retrofit would involve.
Similarly, we know certain preventative medical treatments are costly but save money for the system as a whole when universally applied, yet we still don’t do it.
I'm not sure why that needs to be the case. Open Pilot is essentially a working aftermarket kit, but they can't sell the whole kit legally, only the hardware.
https://www.corriere.it/cronache/25_luglio_11/vivian-spohr-a...
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/lufthansa-ceo-wife-...
IMO that phenomenon completely confounds any attempt at assessing real-world vehicle-pedestrian safety against older statistics.
Fault obviously can obviously go both ways. A large portion of pedestrians are drunk, jaywalking on highways and freeways.
I'm imagining the wheels pop off instantly and smoke comes out of the engine if anything gets near it.
There’s another safety feature for reversing which stops your car in its place when there’s a car passing behind you, for example as you’re exiting a driveway.
Coupled with pre-collision throttle management, it provides exactly the experience I am describing—the car comes to a stop.
Granted, I don’t speed, so maybe that’s why it’s easier for these features to manage the car in these cases.
https://www.jdpower.com/cars/shopping-guides/what-is-forward...
Read more here https://cars.usnews.com/cars-trucks/advice/vehicles-with-the...
"First off, the vitriol against large vehicles is misplaced. The larger the vehicle, the safer for its occupants".
https://youtu.be/YpuX-5E7xoU?si=mNyPrDr1hUGF_AGy&t=56
"American roads are deadliest than ever for pedestrians, cyclists, and, most of all, motorcyclists".
The number of car sales seems to be going down, but pedestrian deaths are increasing. Seems to imply more cars are not the issue, but less safe cars are the issue.
Some cursory research turns up some interesting characteristics of the increase from 2010 to 2020.
• It was almost entirely in urban areas.
• Over 2/3 was on non-freeway arterials. Only about 1.4% was at intersections. (The percent of pedestrian deaths at intersections is around 16%)
• 90% was in darkness.
• It was adults. The rates for children continued to go down. For the years given above they were 2.7, 1.6, 0.8, 0.4, and 0.3 per 100k.
Cars did get heavier from 2010 to 2020 by about 4%. That would mean 4% more momentum at a given speed and 8% more kinetic energy but when dealing with getting hit by things that weigh a lot more than you do velocity is more important than momentum or kinetic energy [1], so I doubt that this was a significant factor.
Cars with shapes that are less safe did get more common, so that could be a part of it, but from where and when most of the increases were it seems there is a good chance that it is not so much that cars themselves but the behavior of drivers (and to a lesser extent) pedestrians that is mostly responsible.
Distracted driving due to phones, speeding, and reckless driving are all way up.
[1] Would you rather be hit by a Fiat 500x at 60 km/hr or the largest freight train ever constructed at 0.2 km/hr (since we usually don't talk about speeds that low to help visualize it at that speed it takes 18 seconds to go 1 meter)? The train would have 500 times the Fiat's momentum and 1.7 times the kinetic energy, but I'll definitely choose to be hit by the train. I'd even pick the train at 1 km/hr, where it has 2500 times the momentum and 42 times the kinetic energy. (Going the other way, a typical 9 mm bullet has 1/1500000th the momentum of that 0.2 km/hr train, and 1/87th the kinetic energy, but I'll the the train over the bullet).
https://www.nhtsa.gov/book/countermeasures-that-work/pedestr...
perhaps if the "modern" car wasn't such a shitshow the accident wouldn't have happened in the first place
One random idea... Instead of giving well off people $7500 to buy huge luxury electric cars that are safe, we give poor people trading in old unsafe cars (that they've owned for over 12 months) $7500 to buy a car with side airbags so they don't die as easily in accidents.
Also, 7500 seems too much for the risk reduction. How much is that per life, tens of millions? More?Seems terribly inefficient.
You can save a life for $150 and most people don't want to. The government is actively moving in the opposite direction, defunding that as a waste of money.
At the same time, "luxury"? Even our 20 year old Scion has ABS and air bags. Okay, no lane keeping or collision avoidance, but I've got that on my (granted, top trim) Hyundai.
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.
[1] https://jlr.scene7.com/is/image/jlr/L663_23MY_014_US?wid=480...
[2] https://jlr.scene7.com/is/image/jlr/L663_23MY_025_US?wid=480...
However...first one works, but I get "access denied" for [1] and [2] (and I have no idea if you control that or not).
https://www.landroverusa.com/vehicles/defender/interior-gall...
(probably should have lead with that instead of just dropping direct links)
this sounds like a cautionary tale of why octogenarians should have their license revoked.
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.
I'm not a specialist but I'm pretty certain that's not why cars are getting bigger and bigger. "I'll pick this X5/Land Rover SUV so it deforms easier when I hit a pedestrian" thought no one ever.
mattmaroon•5mo ago
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.
schneems•5mo ago
mattmaroon•5mo ago
schneems•5mo ago
The bill that required backup cameras came out in 2008 but didn’t fully go into effect until 2018 in order to give carmakers time. (At least) Some of what you’ve attributed to “becoming a standard” is due in part to automakers anticipating the regulation and another part of it being social norms as more and more cars have them so consumers ask for them.
I bought a car circa 2009-2010 as did a bunch of my friends (graduated college in 2008). We bought some of the most popular cars of the day, and zero of them had backup cameras.
I appreciate what you’re saying, that companies do things due to norms and markets (demand). I’m suggesting they also do things due to laws and architecture (Lessig, Code 2.0) and that we cannot rely on only one of the four to protect ourselves.
mattmaroon•5mo ago
It’s because they have to sell higher priced cars by making appealing features and that includes safety. And then the features make their way to the lower end cars.
So having a market where rich people can buy greater safety in the end gives greater safety to everyone.
schneems•5mo ago
"Sure but" but what? I see zero people commenting on an article titled "Safety Today is a Luxury" arguing that the only reason luxury cars are safer is due to regulation.
>So having a market where rich people can buy greater safety in the end gives greater safety to everyone.
I think this is a great pipeline, and and it's worked really well when it's been coupled with a followup: strong consumer protection regulations that make sure the best features are in all the cars.