* The most important, and most expensive, safety feature is mass. Buy the biggest vehicle you can afford to buy gas for. Airbags, stability assist, anti – lock brakes are all pretty standard now. The only unsafe options sold currently are the little tiny boxes that would crumple like a tin can in an accident.
* At the end of the day Steve, it’s all about mass of the vehicle when it comes to safety. Last number I checked was that the average cars weight in 2010 was 4000lbs (it’s probably trending down now). It doesn’t matter if a ‘smart car’ (1800lbs) has a 5 star crash rating if it is run into by a 1992 F250 (6500lbs) with a 1 star rating driven by a Jose… Even though the trend it to make lighter and lighter vehicles (its even creeping into heavy equipment manufacturing) school buses (19,000lbs) still weigh a whole bunch, and mass is the easiest way to engineer safety.
I drive a 3600lb impala (24mpg) here in Houston and my wife drives her Yukon (5000lbs) with my kids in it, and if I had the funds I would send her and the girls out in an up armored HUMVEE for a number of reasons.
Most cars are pretty darn good right now, so in that regard find one that you like that has good reliability record and make sure it weighs as much as you can stand (i.e. afford). Fuel and tires are going to be more expensive of course, but it’s still cheaper than a ride in a helicopter to a hospital.
* There has been a big push by many large companies during that same period to improve driver safety by their employees and thus lower their corporate accident rates and insurance premiums.
My company starting from 2008 now makes us take mandatory on-line driver safety course modules and tests every year. If you don’t pass, you cannot drive a company vehicle or expense a rental car on company business or claim mileage. Further, if you get in an at fault accident at work you will likely now be fired, and every accident, even where you are rear-ended is now a cause for investigation.
My experience is that many people are now driving more safely because of this both at home and work, and that many people benefitted from the driver safety refreshers. Our corporate accident rates have plummeted.
I know this is going on at many companies in the engineering construction industry and also with many of our clients including industrial, petro-chemical, railroads, and more. I suspect it is a very widespread push.
I’ve also seen that some states are now mandating such testing after some traffic violation as a way to lighten the fines and avoiding getting points on your license.
* The burst of the Sand States housing bubble sent many mexican construction workers back home. Maybe that’s why the motor vehicle death rate took a dive at that time.
* Since I felt pretty safe (justifiably) decades ago driving cars which were far less safe in construction and standard (mandatory) equipment than the current models, I don’t think safety is an issue to consider in choosing a modern car. Put simply, the risks are so low and the objective (as oppose to relative) differences so marginal that it just isn’t worth devoting any concern to it.
* If women show their “empowerment’ when they reject all the men they don’t want in their lives, and the rejects have to accept it and go away, then why don’t whites show “empowerment” when we reject the presence of the world’s vagrants we don’t want in our communities and countries?
* Massachusetts increased restrictions on teen drivers around 2007 I believe, such as limiting them to no passengers under 21 in the first six months of driving. Not sure if other states have passed those rules. The stupidest driving I’ve ever done was as a teen with my friends in the car, so if other states followed MA’s example, it could explain it.
* I worked with 70 year old automotive engineers in the 1990′s who all said that just a few simple measures could radically reduce fatalities, but the industry won’t implement them. Like slower speed limits and uniform bumper heights for all vehicles.
* Miles driven went down slightly during the downturn, but it triggered something much bigger. I remember my daily commute going from 1 hour to 20 minutes and talking to coworkers about it. They all saw the same thing. We were all wondering if the economy was really dropping faster then we were being led to believe. The highways in our city were about half full compared to the usual level. Then I read about congestion studies. at just the right levels, a 5-10% drop in the number of daily drivers can result in a 50% drop in the number of cars on the road at any given time. So miles driven dropped slightly, but hours on the road dropped a lot, and number of cars on the road dropped a lot. I could see that saving a lot of lives.
* Cash for clunkers was a Krugman style “pay people to dig holes and lay them to fill them” economic policy so early in the idiocy and scandal sheet of Obama that you’ve forgotten it.
But it did encourage people to get rid of cars that had no airbags. There are no older used cars available anymore. Cash for clunkers took them all away, and people sooner or later, had to replace them with newer cars. The used car market now has all of the major safety improvements like air bags, aide curtain air bags, anti lock brakes.
* What’s interesting about that graphic is that drug overdoses are soaring, but car deaths are declining. In other words, drug use seems to be up (at least pill popping and heroin use anyway) but the addicts aren’t taking their habits out on the rest of us on the road. They’re quietly medicating themselves to death in their domiciles. So to them I offer a hearty thanks!
As for safety features, I think the more bells and whistles that are in your car, the more distracted you become. I recently test drove a 2016 Focus and was rather alarmed at the cockpit. Buttons, gizmos everywhere. The backup camera doesn’t help you when someone is coming at you from the side, only when there’s a stationary object within the camera’s field. Most of these “safety” features unfortunately are aimed at women drivers, who are the real menaces on the road. Ellen Brody comes to mind.
* I can think of a few reasons why road fatalities have gone down. Demographically speaking, the majority of our population consists of the Baby Boomers, and they’re moving into their retirement years. Older people drive smarter than young people, or at least they do until they start becoming senile.
The Cash-for-Clunkers scheme shrank the used-car market dramatically, removing a lot of ‘starter’ cars from the road that the poor used to buy. Consequently, the poor have been forced to take the bus because the price of new cars is so high they can’t afford one.
The price of gas was bouncing around 4 bucks a gallon for a long time, the most expensive it’s ever been, and more people have been staying off the road because of it.
A lot of people have acquired video games, home computers, internet, cell phones, DVD players, big screen TVs, etc., and a lot of bored guys who used to pile into their cars and go joyriding around town looking for action are now at home playing video games, surfing the internet, or watching movies rented from Redbox.
And finally, if you’re the sort of person who couldn’t make your house payments, then you couldn’t make your car payments, either. People who lost their houses in the crash also had their cars repossessed. They also ended taking the bus. This is why owning a car in the ghetto is a bragging point.
In sum, if you can get the poor and dumb off the road, you’ll have fewer accidents. Smart people drive more safely.
* I have a suspicion that the rise in white death rate from opiod overdose has something to do with the medical profession being swarmed by Indian and Pakistani Dr Feelgoods. Immigrant doctors gravitate to the less desirable medical practices but make a lot of money double billing Medicare and Medicaid and have no empathy for their elderly, mentally ill, or financially distressed patients, especially if they are white.
* The pursuit of a career in the Medical profession for Asian/Oriental communities is mostly about status and money, so they will want to get rid of their clients as quick as possible with as little fuss as possible, ergo just prescribe SSRIs or whatever makes the patient feel good and out of the way.
Since Indian/Pakistani doctors come from a culture that doesn’t even care about the less fortunate amongst them, why would they have empathy for White, Black or Hispanic American patients.
* 1) Going from subcompact to compact to midsize yields big safety improvements. The safety improvements really taper off (or go negative!) above mid-size. One of the reasons for that is not obvious: lower volume sales cars have fewer safety features because the car companies trick out the high volume sellers with more options. Mid-size is a very competitive market. Mid-size looks safer than full size. But look at the newer IIHS scores on full size since they’ve improved. Impala has 5 bar score for automated crash prevention for example. Taurus is only 1 bar.
2) SUVs really are safer on average. But some cars do as well as SUVs in death rates.
3) Within a segment the death rates vary greatly. But some have fewer cars sold and so less statistically significant. You need to consider the crash tests too.
4) Rollover death rates are really low. Don’t worry too much about 4 and 5 stars for NHTSA or IIHS roof tests. Electronic stabilization control has made rollovers much less common even among SUVs.
* A quick and dirty test might be to ask yourself, “how would this car hold up if it were T-boned by a speeding SUV?” Getting T-boned is how a lot of people die, or are maimed. The red light runners you don’t expect. That might readjust your decision to buy a cute mini-cooper.
In Steve’s case, since he’s tall, his question might be, “when I sit in this car, is my left leg above, level, or below the steering column?”
He’ll want it to be below the steering column, since if he’s hit hard from the side, the door collapses against his leg, taking it into the steering column turning what was once a functional leg, a bloody goo. Having his leg below the steering column allows it to move towards the center of the car in the event of an ugly side-collision, instead of being crushed between the door and steering column.
The auto collision warning system is a great feature, since it will chirp or gently ring if some problem seems afoot, just like your wife, without the added feature of screaming like a maniac when everything’s under control, like many, many wives.
* As a fellow resident of the metropolitan LA area I like having all the safety technology I can afford. Driving on our freeways and surface streets is very challenging and, as a reminder, you’re not getting any younger, Steve.
We recently bought two Subarus, a 2015 Outback and a 2015 Crosstrek, because they have a lot of safety features and great safety ratings (and reviews) at a very decent price. Both our cars have Eyesight, which is the pre-collision/lane departure system. It has pre-collision warning/braking/throttle management and adaptive cruise control. My husband’s favorite feature is the adaptive cruise control. My sister commutes weekly between states for her job and also loves adaptive cc on her Audi Q7. I’ve had the pre-collision warning give me a heads up on traffic slowing a couple of time when I wasn’t paying close attention on the freeway so I like it a lot. It won’t detect you running into something as narrow as a telephone pole, as someone above noted, but it should have detected the dumpster in his story. The commenter probably wasn’t going fast enough to trigger the system. As for getting inured to the warning beeps, you don’t. The lane departure doesn’t alert as long as you signal before you change lanes, which you should do anyway. The only time the pre-collision wrongly beeps is when a person in front of me is stopped to make a turn and my car thinks I am speeding towards them too fast, when I’ve judged that I can go around them or they’ll be out of my way in time. I’ve only had the brakes kick in once in a case like that.
My Outback also has blind spot detection and rear cross-traffic alert, which is very handy when backing out of parking spots. I find the blind spot detection useful on our freeways when my quick glance over the shoulder can’t tell if a car is in the next lane or farther over. Both cars have steering responsive fog lights that illuminate the corner we’re turning into. I honestly haven’t noticed that feature that much but I think the fog lights do a great job lighting up faded lines on the freeway at night. I have the V6 model of the Outback which also gives me HID lights that my aging eyes like a lot. I find them much brighter with a wider illumination pattern than the lights on my old Sienna minivan. Though not a safety feature, our cars have auto-dimming review and side mirrors which is a feature you don’t think you need but once you have it find it very nice. Our cars also have keyless access/push button start which means I can open doors just by grabbing the handle. As a woman, I find not having to dig for keys in my purse a wonderful, wonderful thing.
The Toyota minivan I traded in for the Subaru was only a 2009 and an upper trim model at that, but my husband and I were surprised how much auto technology had migrated into lower priced cars in that time. You should take a look at Subarus – they’re getting great reviews and we had to order both of ours since they are hot sellers.
