You’ve probably heard about the “star” system for rating the saaaaaaaaaaaafety of new cars. It’s fear porn on wheels – because there’s no such thing as an unsafe new vehicle. Or – for that matter – any vehicle built in decades.
When was the last time you heard about a car that became uncontrollable because the steering failed – or failed to stop because the brakes failed? Such a car would fit the definition of “unsafe” in the rational sense.
That is not the sense meant by saaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaafety ratings.
These ratings equate “safety” with two things, chiefly. The first is crashworthiness, which is defined as impact resistance. This is not the same thing as crash-likeliness, which would qualify a vehicle as actually unsafe. To make the point: The ’74 VW Beetle I drove for a few years during and just after college wasn’t especially crashworthy – in the sense that it was relatively fragile. Its body was not designed to withstand tremendous impact forces; it was designed to be light so that the car would not need a big engine and so be easy on gas. If you ran into something, the relatively thin metal didn’t offer a great deal of crash protection – and of course, the car had no air bags to cushion you from impact forces. This did not mean the car was crash-likely. In fact, it was a very controllable car, which is key to avoiding crashes. It was light and agile, which further reduces crash-likelihood, assuming the driver makes use of a vehicle’s lightness and agility to avoid potential crash scenarios.
Of course, my ’74 Beetle (and for that matter, my ’76 Trans Am, which is much more heavily built and so much more crashworthy – in the saaaaaaaaaaafety sense) would be libeled as very “unsafe” by the standards used to rate the saaaaaaaaaaafety of new cars for a second reason, already hinted at: The absence of air bags and other saaaaaaaaaaaaaaaafety “technologies” such as Automated Emergency Braking (AEB) and eye-movement trackers. A car that hasn’t got all of these things – the maximum possible/available – is sure to be libeled as “unsafe” or at least “less safe” than a car that does have all these things. This is fascinating to me, since I have been driving my 1976 Trans-Am for the past 30-plus years and haven’t crashed it once. Despite it not even having first-generation saaaaaaaaaafety “technologies” such as anti-lock brakes or traction control. I never needed these “technologies” because I’ve never lost control of my Trans-Am, chiefly because it’s controllable (in the sense that it doesn’t handle unpredictably or suddenly veer off the road or fail to slow down when I push on the brake pedal).
Yet it is “unsafe” – per the bent definition of saaaaaaaaaaaaafety put forward by the Safety Cultists who’ve managed to do what Jim Jones, and the Reverend Moon never managed to do, which is to transform their once-aberrant little cult into a mainstream religion. Back when it was a cult, very few Americans considered cars such the old VW Beetle “unsafe.” In fact, millions of Americans drove them regularly. Think about that. The same goes for cars like my ’76 Trans-Am and also all the cars made say ten years ago. Do you realize that almost all circa 2016 model year vehicles would qualify for the “unsafe” libel if an attempt was made to sell the exact same car today? All it takes to qualify is to b;e slightly out-of-compliance with the roster of federal “safety” mandates that apply to all current model year cars. Three years from now – come 2029 – when the AEB mandate goes into effect – every vehicle made before the mandate went into effect that does not have AEB will join the ranks of the “unsafe.”
Here’s another interesting thing about how saaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaafety is defined: It is defined according to class as well as vintage. A small crossover that has a “5 Star” rating for crashworthiness is presented and perceived as very “safe.” But it is only that “safe” relative to other small cars in its class. It is much less actually safe – in terms of its ability to withstand impact forces – than a larger more heavily built car in a different class, even if the latter has only three or four “stars” because it’s older or doesn’t have all the very latest saaaaaaaaaaafety “technologies (such as AEB). To make the point, which would you rather be a passenger in, if there’s a serious crash: A 2011 Lincoln Town Car or a brand-new “5 Star” rated subcompact crossover?
Maybe you feel saaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaafer in the “5 Star” subcompact. It’s the same sort of feeling some people had during “COVID” – when wearing a maaaaaaaaaaaaaask made them feel saaaaaaaaaaaaaafer.
. . .
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The thing about safety and risk assessments… they are mine to make, no one else’s. When I left the house in my late teens, I became solely in charge of this area of my life.
To the Safety Nazis who try to make my business theirs, I fart in your general direction.
Hey Eric,
Off-topic but FYI:
https://www.youtube.com/@EricDetersShow
Sorry to report another near doppelganger in name, and source of confusion and conflation for you.
Lawsee, BaDnOn!
It’s like McDowell’s vs. McDonald’s in Coming to America!
It’s not about safety, it’s about control. The jew run panopticon cannot allow anyone to not buy in to the satanic death system of misery, taxation and death.
Fun vs. Risk:
If you graph it out, they are positively correlated, with an extremely sharp drop off I refer to as “The Cusp of Certain Death.”
Speaking of safety, Eric, this article popped up. Toyota has filed a patent where your vehicle could pull up your health records. What could possibly go wrong with a vehicle that has that, including your Social Slave Number (in most people’s health records), and everything else that a vehicle has no business having knowledge of. https://www.msn.com/en-us/autos/general/toyota-s-new-patent-isn-t-really-about-photos-it-s-about-reading-your-health-records-first/ar-AA2cAaKU?ocid=winp1taskbar&cvid=494f80c3664d40b2eb0be0cc1fde00dd&ei=24
How ironic, in that if one wants to avoid all the saaafety tech and crap, one just needs to find a vehicle with the worst “safety” rating. For maybe it does not contain all the tech needed to keep one safe in a world that they apparently did not realize was always dangerous, with or without such garbage included that some of us did not ask for.
People’s perception of the effectiveness of government saaaaaaaafety mandates is counter to what reality is. People will say cars are much saaaaaaafer now than they were in the 1970s, 80s and 90’s.
Their main focus is on vehicle dynamics: Handling, acceleration, braking, and steering. It should be noted that NHTSA’s standards control almost none of these, except for rudimentary regulations on diagonal braking systems and maybe now automatic braking.
The other perception of safety comes from todays cars which are ostensibly able to take a hit from another vehicle while supposedly protecting vehicle occupants. That’s a big maybe since unprotected pedestrians, cyclists and motorcyclists have been hit in increasing numbers in the last 15 years or so. Pedestrian fatals rose from 4600 annually in 2000-09 to over 8k today. People can’t see around todays vehicles and it is costing lives.
So today, we get a bunch of safety crap on cars like blind spot monitoring, lane keep “assist” and other “technologies” which are designed to counteract the changes to the physical vehicle stance and profile necessitated by prior regulations.
You are all right. The safety cult is a menace to our highways needs to be annihilated.
“People can’t see around todays vehicles and it is costing lives.”
Especially while they’re looking down at their sailfawn while strolling into traffic because “pedestrians have the right-of-way”…physics be damned.
“ Their main focus is on vehicle dynamics: Handling, acceleration, braking, and steering. It should be noted that NHTSA’s standards control almost none of these, except for rudimentary regulations on diagonal braking systems and maybe now automatic braking ”
Nonsense. Go read the FVSS regulations.
FVMSS 135
FMVSS 126
Those will get you started.
Rational thinking is usually the first thing to disappear when people get all worked up. I remember those cars from the 1950s—big, heavy things with steering columns that would spear you in the chest and metal dashboards that were about as forgiving as hitting the other car directly.
There’s no question those cars were less safe. Once seat belts, padded dashboards, and collapsible steering columns became common in the 1960s, people had a much better chance of surviving a crash. In a truly informed marketplace, buyers should have a choice—and the market did, in fact, speak for itself.
Anyone claiming that most people wouldn’t choose a safer car is simply being disingenuous. If you could choose between a toaster that was less likely to electrocute you and one known as “Old Sparky,” any sensible person would choose the safer one.
The same thing happened with disc brakes. They were never mandated, but I’m old enough to remember them being proudly advertised in brochures right alongside MacPherson struts and wishbone suspension. Of course, airbags and ABS didn’t really catch on until regulations required them. Those early airbags could be awfully violent and weren’t especially effective, so perhaps consumers were simply wise to wait until the technology improved.
Hi Linda,
I agree with gist of what you’ve said. People will generally buy things that make sense, that are an improvement – assuming the cost is in line with the benefit. When the government gets involved, cost-benefit gets decided by the government. And cost always goes up! Air bags – to discuss one example – probably would have gotten less expensive over time. But no one should be forced to buy air bags – or anything else, including seat belts. Those who consider them worth the cost ought to be free to buy them. But those who do not should likewise be free to skip them. Let the market decide. Which is just a way of saying let you and me and everyone else decide.
The obsession with “safety” has become a kind of neurosis. The cars of the ’70s I grew up riding in and later on, driving were not “unsafe.” They just didn’t have some of the features and equipment current cars have. My ’76 Trans-Am, for example, handles well and has adequate brakes. To characterize it as “unsafe” because it hasn’t got air bags or ABS or a back-up camera is silly.
“They” will never let progress / regulation / safety stop at a sweet spot of common sense.
As stated, simple design improvements greatly increased survival. Basic pollution fixes greatly improved air quality. No lead gas = hardened valves/valve seats and cleaner engine oil and our first gen “no lead heads” 71 Nova at 205,000 miles used little oil and ran perfectly fine. 79 Pontiac, ditto, at 255k miles.
Simple throttle body fuel injection systems with one discrete computer another big improvement in emissions control plus better economy. Easy to diagnose and maintain. Four valve heads even better economy and lots more power.
Coulda stopped mid 90s maybe early 2000s. Oh no, on it goes trying to eek out meaningless micro decreases in emissions and micro increases in ‘crash worthiness’. Diesel engine advantages compromised with low sulfur fuel and now the DEF insanity. Pedestrians less safe due to huge car roof pillars and rear view mirror mounted claptrap limiting visibility.
These devices that takeover the control of a car away from the driver have and will kill people. As Les Grossman said in Tropic Thunder…”it’s inevitable”
Out of curiosity I ask; if you brake check someone and they crash into you, you might be charged if they hit you but if someone’s AEB brake checks someone and the car records it was initiated by the car’s computer is the driver charged for causing an accident or the car?
Excellent question!
I’ll bet not more than a handful of these cases will ever see the inside of courtroom or a jury.
The suffering will be socialized in the form of higher and higher insurance premiums.
AEB only responds to forward facing threats. It will not respond to a car tailgating. Therefore AEB isn’t capable of brake checking.
If a car is following another too closely and cannot stop in time and rear ends the lead vehicle – the driver of the car in the rear will be cited for failure to allow assured clear distance ahead.
The law is clear on who’s at fault for rear end accidents. Brake checking someone intentionally with the intent of causing an accident is a whole different matter and usually falls under reckless, careless, or road rage adjacent charges.
One scenario: “your” car’s AEB “sees” something ahead in the road, the car following you is just beginning to paull out to pass as “your” car’s AEB hits the brakes and the car behind you hits your leftmost bumper performing a perfect PIT maneuver.
Fun times ahead at that accident scene.
His point is that auto braking is only reacting to what’s in front of you so the car behind you would be running too close if it hits you regardless if the first panic stop was initiated by a human or computer. The question a lawyer might raise to introduce doubt is would this accident have occurred differently if all the actors were human with slower reaction times? This assumes of course that AEB ends up actually showing a statistical reduction in collisions in the first place. It may or may not. I’d expect with mature technology having radar and IR sensing the ability to prevent animal strikes would be improved. Whether traffic accidents are decreased is anyone’s guess. Nannies are apt to say taking the human out of the decision flow will but we all know that even after 50 years PCs still sometimes crash so technology is certainly not infallible either.
“This assumes of course that AEB ends up actually showing a statistical reduction in collisions in the first place.”
I’ve seen that data as compiled from various state accident databases and the available insurance industry data in 2022.
It is right on the cusp of statistical reduction in forward collisions. The data on whether secondary collisions from the rear were increased as a result of AEB avoiding a forward collision was not conclusive.
Insurance industry data clearly showed that repairing cars with AEB after a collision was more expensive due to forward looking camera and radar damaged by an accident.
It is very odd that AEB is being mandated given the data I saw.
However, never underestimate the lobbying power of the supply chain that provides the hardware such as Mobileye, Continental, Bosch, etc. Likewise NHTSA and EuroNCAP love to increase their regulatory control regardless of what benefits there may be to the consumer.
One thing is sure, we’ll need to hatch a whole new crop of activist lawyers to figure it out. And then, once they are un/under employed, they go into politics and the ole NGO grift. We don’t hate them near enough.
Another demonstration of the “safety” illusion. “My car is safe”, as you trip over a curb and fall in front of a “safe” car, and get run over. Life is a terminal disease.
Before the government databases, before cars were common, it was remarkably common for someone to die by horse. The critters kick, and buck, and spook/run wild, leading to lots of broken necks and bones when sepsis and infection were inexorable death sentences.
Oddly enough, people rode them and pulled stuff with them anyway. What’s the point of a long life if you never get to live?
Nearly none of the improvements in longevity came from politicians/lawyers or doctors, they came from engineers (usually without academic training). Seat (lap) belts might have saved a lot of lives had they existed in the era of the slick bench seat. In a modern car where everything is designed to hold you in place comfortably, they’re usually irrelevant.
The idea that cars and life are getting safer is technically true, but irrelevant. And when all the longer life leads to is despair and misery, why bother?
We get one shot in this mortal coil, god gives us free will and thus freedom, and the adversary’s minions work tirelessly to take it away. Evil always hides behind claims of doing good.
Hi Ernie,
Re longevity I’ve read a few studies that suggest a severely calorie restricted diet will increase your lifespan, but the people in the study report always feeling cold and hungry. So what’s the point of a long life if you’re going to feel miserable? Eat, drink, and be merry because who knows when you’re gonna die.
“Evil always hides behind claims of doing good.” You speak the truth Ernie.
There are numerous trade-offs and costs for these apparent “safety features.” The individual should be the one to decide how much to pay and trade off. I occasionally drive a Lexus, which is perfectly pleasant, but has horrendous outward visibility because of the huge pillars and short windows. I’m sure it’s very safe from an impact standpoint, but it’s a bitch to drive safely because I can’t see shit with all the blind spots. I feel like I’m driving a Sherman tank. One could legitimately call this an unsafe car, even though it complies with 2022 “safety” standards.
You’ve hit on the fundamental. It’s a philosophical question. Almost no one wants to die. Most people acknowledge no one makes it out alive.
There are sociopath wealthy people behind the digitizing everything because they think being immortal in a machine is cheating death. They’re insane. When it was Howard Hughes they were harmless. They aren’t anymore.
That said, even though we all know we’re going to die we also don’t want it to be premature. What that means, though, is what it means to be human. What’s the point of pushing off death if it means you never really live?
Still, I like to think I’m trying to live and honestly feel like I’m lucky to be over 60 because of riding dirt bikes, even 3-wheelers in the day, rock climbing, etc. I wasn’t brave enough to volunteer for Airborne. Jumping out of planes? Fuck that. Now if I could have qualified for flight school or been able to afford to learn later, I think I would have liked that. Maybe I will when I finally retire.
Someone once told me that the ultimate “Saaaaaaaaaaafety” feature in an automobile is a competent HUMAN driver rather than all the Nanny State gadgets in an automobile, which rings true. Another way to ensure actual safety is keeping up on maintenance needs.
As for this obsession with “Saaaaaaaaaaafety” among many Americans, it seems to have metastisized during COVID, as corporate media and elitist billionaires ran a campaign of “Nobody’s safe unless everybody’s safe!”, and people obsessed with “Saaaaaaaaaaafety” insisted that EVERYONE wear face diapers everywhere AND take an experimental COVID vaxx that ultimately turned out NOT to be “Safe and Effective!”, and yet, some of the same people obsessed with Saaaaaaaaaaafety are STILL getting vaxxed and virtue signaling about it on social media. The ironic thing is, they claim they’re “Following Science”, but they’re actually following a secular religion of VACCINES.
Dear old dad always said the most important single part in a car was the nut that holds the steering wheel.
The “connecting link”….between the seat and the steering wheel. Lol
Lies, damn lies and marketing. You never hear about the star ratings outside of ads. There’s a reason for that. And no manufacturer will ever mention if the vehicle’s “crash rating” is less than five. So you shop for vehicles in-between the action on football Sunday (when most automobiles are advertised) you have a choice between choosing a five star rated vehicle or the others -which might be anywhere from one to four. You’ll never know because no one wants to tout any rating less than five.
Then there’s the test itself. The test is known. The testing methodology is known. Engineers build products to excel at passing the test. If the test changes, the engineering changes.
VW got into a heap of trouble building to the test.
How many fatalities were due to car crashes that weren’t quite like the test? All of them. Otherwise that five star rated vehicle would have saved everyone.
Look at it this way, when gas becomes completely unaffordable thanks to donnie trumpstein’s war, all cars will be safe as they will be very expensive yard art.
Much like my guitars are now wall art having succumbed to hearing impairment.
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed, hence clamorous to be led to safety, with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of the imaginary.” – HL Mencken (a hundred flippin’ years ago)
“When will they ever learn?” – Pete Seegar (sixty-five years ago)
“I will annihilate Iran.” – DJ Trump, aka Our Little Caligula (48 hours ago)
The world is coming to an end. It will suffocate under a pile of its own bullshit.
“The world is coming to an end. It will suffocate under a pile of its own bullshit.”
I’m totally stealing that line!
‘You’ve probably heard about the “star” system for rating the saaaaaaaaaaaafety of new cars.’ — eric
Actually, I haven’t — being a forest-dwelling creature only loosely in touch with so-called civilization.
Who-what-when-where-why is applying this latest ‘trial by oogaboogah’ to harangue, humiliate and pester the living shit out of us, the way the Clintons used to do?
Lord knows, it grows tiresome.
AEB is poison.