“ "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.
Not all auto makers just up and decided backup camera are now a standard feature. Rather: it’s a regulation put in place by Congress. To assume that cars will continue getting the same level of steady safety updates also assumes that the regulatory environment of the next 20 years looks like the last 20 years. As opposed to a regulatory environment that looks like the last 20 months.
It was becoming a standard on even low end cars before the mandate but you could pick any number of features that weren’t mandated that fit the same pattern.
It’s good that the industry does the right thing sometimes. It’s also good to have strong consumer protections when they don’t do the right thing.
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.
Sure but if a luxury car is safer than any other car it’s not because it was regulated to be. The laws don’t discriminate.
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.
> Sure but if a luxury car is safer than any other car it’s not because it was regulated to be.
"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.
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.
That’s a great point - safety has been improving at an incredible pace over the years. The same argument could possibly be made when comparing a vehicle from 1960 with another from 1975. I wonder if some things got lost in translation.
Your point stands, but collapsible steering columns and seat belts have been mandated in the U. S. since the late '60s.
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.
The headline implies Giorgetto Giugaro said something. If you infer something else, that's on you. It is important for media literacy to understand these distinctions.
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.
First, cars are lasting much longer than they used to
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 think it's a shame that we can't add new safety features into older cars.
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.
I feel like there's very little engineering reasons why we can't...
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.
I understand your premise, but I think the missing part of the cost function here, especially when it comes to safety, is the price of a human life. The US government has actually quantified it, and I think when we account for that it’s probably worth it. Though where exactly that money would come from is a problem.
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.
>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.
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.
There are older cars that have the same safety features as new ones but those cars are still expensive. I don’t remember any super novel safety feature that came up in last 10 to 15 years. Especially ones that could be just added to any car. Crumple zones are model specific you can’t just change those without making new car.
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.
Open Pilot essentially created an aftermarket advanced adaptive cruise control that works better than most brands outside of Tesla. They just can't sell it legally as a whole package, so you buy the hardware, but the software is open source.
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.
On the flip side, I bought an used 08 Sprinter van over the previous, more reliable generation, mainly for the side airbags. It turned out the one I bought didn't have them.
It was a $120 option, and most buyers opted out. A few years later they were made mandatory.
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 point is, those features were available to people buying S classes 15 years ago. So not only were rich people safer for those 15 years, there's still a huge subset of people that even today drive old cheaper cars instead of buying the Hyundai that has it today.
There's probably a 30 year safety difference between rich and poor.
Idk so what. We can go from there once we at least are talking about the same thing correctly, so I tried to correct the misconception by OP.
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.
Well the government does both. Also, the 7500 is so the rich people buy electric instead of gas.
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.
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.
Are we sure about this? In the US the pedestrian death rate from cars in 1980, 1990, 2000, 2010, and 2020 was 3.6, 2.6, 1.7, 1.4, and 2.0 per 100k.
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).
In the late 1970s children younger than 15 represented 18% of all pedestrian fatality victims. By 2021 they represented just 2.4% of all pedestrian fatalities (NCSA, 2023c; Schneider, 2020). These decreases correspond with declining rates of walking by children as measured by national surveys of household travel (Buehler et al., 2020; Kontou et al., 2020).
It’s called forward collision avoidance assist (a safety feature).
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.
You’re right, more pedestrian deaths are occurring year over year, but I think that’s more due to lack of safety features.
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.
Such a deference of responsibility. The world and the community should absolutely prioritize pedestrians. The driver operating a 5000 lb dangerous weapon should 100% be the responsible for the consequences.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
“ "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.
Not all auto makers just up and decided backup camera are now a standard feature. Rather: it’s a regulation put in place by Congress. To assume that cars will continue getting the same level of steady safety updates also assumes that the regulatory environment of the next 20 years looks like the last 20 years. As opposed to a regulatory environment that looks like the last 20 months.
It was becoming a standard on even low end cars before the mandate but you could pick any number of features that weren’t mandated that fit the same pattern.
It’s good that the industry does the right thing sometimes. It’s also good to have strong consumer protections when they don’t do the right thing.
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.
Sure but if a luxury car is safer than any other car it’s not because it was regulated to be. The laws don’t discriminate.
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.
> Sure but if a luxury car is safer than any other car it’s not because it was regulated to be.
"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.
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.
That’s a great point - safety has been improving at an incredible pace over the years. The same argument could possibly be made when comparing a vehicle from 1960 with another from 1975. I wonder if some things got lost in translation.
Your point stands, but collapsible steering columns and seat belts have been mandated in the U. S. since the late '60s.
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.
Seat belts were compulsory equipment in cars from about 1966.
What do you mean misleading? It is a direct quote.
The headline implies the situation "today" is somehow worse than it used to be, when this is manifestly not the case.
The headline implies Giorgetto Giugaro said something. If you infer something else, that's on you. It is important for media literacy to understand these distinctions.
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.
First, cars are lasting much longer than they used to
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 think it's a shame that we can't add new safety features into older cars.
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.
I feel like there's very little engineering reasons why we can't...
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.
I understand your premise, but I think the missing part of the cost function here, especially when it comes to safety, is the price of a human life. The US government has actually quantified it, and I think when we account for that it’s probably worth it. Though where exactly that money would come from is a problem.
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.
>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.
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.
There are older cars that have the same safety features as new ones but those cars are still expensive. I don’t remember any super novel safety feature that came up in last 10 to 15 years. Especially ones that could be just added to any car. Crumple zones are model specific you can’t just change those without making new car.
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.
Open Pilot essentially created an aftermarket advanced adaptive cruise control that works better than most brands outside of Tesla. They just can't sell it legally as a whole package, so you buy the hardware, but the software is open source.
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.
On the flip side, I bought an used 08 Sprinter van over the previous, more reliable generation, mainly for the side airbags. It turned out the one I bought didn't have them.
It was a $120 option, and most buyers opted out. A few years later they were made mandatory.
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 point is, those features were available to people buying S classes 15 years ago. So not only were rich people safer for those 15 years, there's still a huge subset of people that even today drive old cheaper cars instead of buying the Hyundai that has it today. There's probably a 30 year safety difference between rich and poor.
So what? Seems like a good thing safety is improving.
Idk so what. We can go from there once we at least are talking about the same thing correctly, so I tried to correct the misconception by OP.
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.
Well the government does both. Also, the 7500 is so the rich people buy electric instead of gas.
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.
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.
He's something of a legend, for example he designed the delorean, which had the great safety feature of being very slow.
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.
On the other hand, newer cars have gotten more dangerous for pedestrians. Safety is indeed a luxury.
Are we sure about this? In the US the pedestrian death rate from cars in 1980, 1990, 2000, 2010, and 2020 was 3.6, 2.6, 1.7, 1.4, and 2.0 per 100k.
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).
You need to factor in advancements in emergency medicine since 1980.
In the late 1970s children younger than 15 represented 18% of all pedestrian fatality victims. By 2021 they represented just 2.4% of all pedestrian fatalities (NCSA, 2023c; Schneider, 2020). These decreases correspond with declining rates of walking by children as measured by national surveys of household travel (Buehler et al., 2020; Kontou et al., 2020).
https://www.nhtsa.gov/book/countermeasures-that-work/pedestr...
Roaming in my huge SUV in Sardinia, being lethal danger to pedestrians:
https://www.corriere.it/cronache/25_luglio_11/vivian-spohr-a...
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/lufthansa-ceo-wife-...
How? My car breaks automatically whenever there’s an obstacle behind it or in front of it.
> My car breaks automatically whenever there’s an obstacle behind it or in front of it.
I'm imagining the wheels pop off instantly and smoke comes out of the engine if anything gets near it.
It’s called forward collision avoidance assist (a safety feature).
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...
And yet, observational data suggests that driving a huge car makes it harder for you to get injured an easier for everyone else. For example:
"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".
https://youtu.be/YpuX-5E7xoU?si=BGaDhmefTKCr8cAL&t=96
You’re right, more pedestrian deaths are occurring year over year, but I think that’s more due to lack of safety features.
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.
https://www.consumershield.com/articles/how-many-cars-us
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TOTALSA
It also ignores Newtons laws?
Pedestrians walking around staring at their phones have made the streets less safe for pedestrians, as have drivers staring at their phones.
IMO that phenomenon completely confounds any attempt at assessing real-world vehicle-pedestrian safety against older statistics.
Such a deference of responsibility. The world and the community should absolutely prioritize pedestrians. The driver operating a 5000 lb dangerous weapon should 100% be the responsible for the consequences.
If I walk into someone's kitchen, stick my hand in a blender, and turn it on, should the owner be responsible?
Fault obviously can obviously go both ways. A large portion of pedestrians are drunk, jaywalking on highways and freeways.
What's even more dangerous for pedestrian is SUV driver staring at their phone.
Exactly. It also doesn't help that cars are harder to see out of these days.
> He considers himself "privileged" to be in as good shape as he is, and credits the modern luxury car he was driving for making it possible.
perhaps if the "modern" car wasn't such a shitshow the accident wouldn't have happened in the first place
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.)
[0] https://jlr.scene7.com/is/image/jlr/L663_22MY_031_US?wid=480...
[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...
Giugiaro lost control on a tight right-hand hairpin between Cala di Volpe and Romazzino.
this sounds like a cautionary tale of why octogenarians should have their license revoked.
Thanks much!
However...first one works, but I get "access denied" for [1] and [2] (and I have no idea if you control that or not).
I don't, sorry. These are just images that I pulled off this site:
https://www.landroverusa.com/vehicles/defender/interior-gall...
(probably should have lead with that instead of just dropping direct links)
It’s a Land Rover, he is lucky it didn’t burst into flames.
https://thedevilspanties.com/archives/16626
Safety is not a luxury in Europe. Roads are designed to minimise the chances of an accident.
I take it you haven't driven in Greece?
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.
> Vehicles have to be bigger in order to be safer
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.
No sure if sarcasm...
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.
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"I'm a rich asshole and even when I almost kill myself that I'll remind you I'm rich and you are poor"