Guest Post by starfcker
Our good friend Eric Peters often rails against the idea of safety mandates on automobiles sold in the United States. His argument is that safety equipment raises prices and diminishes choices, while adding weight and diminishing fuel economy.. I personally like as safe a car as possible, as long as it looks nice, and is fun to drive. I live in a very crazy fast driving metro (south Florida), so I see all kinds of nasty ways people can fuck up in a car. And I am always grateful at how many people not only live, but emerge from crumpled tangles of metal in one piece, seemingly ready to do it again.
Speed kills, or at least it used to, which can suck in a place where everybody drives like a bat out of hell. I credit the federal mandates and the brilliant engineers who figure this stuff out with saving countless lives that would otherwise be snuffed out in an instant. Randomly. Anyway, i’m always amazed at just how good cars have become, and how good your average driver is down here, because there are actually a lot less wrecks than there ought to be, due to the combination of high speed and a large immigrant population new to the finer points of automotive handling at such speeds.
We get lots of tourists, too, and they often look overwhelmed by the high speed brutality of south Florida traffic. Our highways are amazing, really, and do just what they were made to do, move massive amounts of traffic, quickly. Five or six lanes in either direction is the norm, so there is lots of crazy merging going on all the time. It is completely normal to be traveling at eighty miles an hour two car lengths behind the car in front of you and other cars using that space to merge. It’s easier than you think as long as everybody is going the same speed, kind of like NASCAR. But back to the point of my story, safety.
I was driving home last night, basic rainy night, nothing special. Traffic was light, conditions were fairly good, traffic was going a little slower due to the weather, maybe 65-70. I was on westbound interstate 595 in one of the middle lanes. The car up ahead of me was cruising along uneventfully, when things got scary for him. His car abruptly hydroplaned, and sent him into a big spin to his left. Before he lost any speed, he straightened out and hit an abuttment head on. Ugly as it gets, at those speeds. His car jumped three feet in the air on impact, ouch.
I pulled over as quick as I could and ran back to see what I could do. The car, some japanese thing, i think, was destroyed. There was only one guy, the driver in the car. He didn’t respond when I tried talking to him. I used the flashlight on my phone and didn’t see any blood. He started moving, and rapidly got his act together. He was fine. The airbag knocked the wind out of him, but the combination seatbelt/airbag and the energy absorbing setup in front of the concrete abuttment saved his life. That was a mean hit. Within a minute, he was out of the car and walking around, still a little dazed. I had to herd him back from walking out into highway traffic for a few minutes until he got his wits back.
An accident like that could easily be fatal. Instead, the driver walked away. The equipment saved him, just like it was designed to do. In my opinion, that’s a great thing. Without it, and the mandate that required it, that poor dude might not have made it home to his family. His luck might have run out right there. Be careful what you wish for, not everything government touches is bad.
I had a friend, Jeff Augenstein who passed away a couple of years ago. Jeff was the chief trauma surgeon at Jackson Memorial Hospital, which is the big public hospital in Dade county. He worked extensively with NHTSA and the department of transportation, documenting the kinds of injuries he saw, and coming up with ways how to prevent them. He got several awards for his work on those issues, and was pretty badass. He took crushed and broken human beings, and put them back together before they died, every day. That’s a skillset. But he always told me the goal was survivability with zero injuries, and despite the daily carnage he saw, he believed it was possible. With the one i saw today, maybe he was right.
I suppose Starfckr will be coming for our guns next?
Safe cars don’t require the government. They require market demand, which you have proved exists.
Kudos for being a good Samaritan though.
If you want to buy a safe car my hats off to you, but the government shouldn’t tell me that I have to buy a safe car. Leave the choice to the individual.
BTW I would pick a safer car.
The argument here seems to be that we need to make the world safe for reckless, dangerous and irresponsible behavior.
Just structure everything so no one can get hurt if he or she misuses it.
Public safety, it’s for the peoples own good, the same argument used for everything from prescription drug licensing to gun control, the rule of the day in a fear filled society I suppose.
I saw a news story on a special “driving” license for a quadraplegic with a car that is operated by head movement/line of vision. The news anchor went on and on about how wonderful it was. I wonder if his neighbors check to see if his car is in the garage before they leave their driveway.
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love the cow gif
(Windows user here) right-click, Save Image As, and it’s yours
I’m not for gov’t mandates, but I am for a free market mandating safer vehicles. If you want to buy something that isn’t safe because it’s cool looking or super fast, fine, but the insurance co’s. do have a right to raise your premiums to unbearable levels to punish you for that decision. There’s a reason that insuring a 18 yr old on a corvette is expensive…and thus few of them have one.
Starfckr,
don’t lie or misrepresent your desires. its not that you want safe cars, we all want safe cars. the problem is each person’s definition of safe varies. what you desire is destruction of choice and personal responsibility in favor of govt defining and mandating what “safe” is as if it’s universal standard/truth.
if only the govt had a bit more power we’d live in a utopia. guns (or insert anything under the sun here) aren’t “safe” enough per govt standards so lets create mandates for that too, that’s the mindset that lacks the perspective of the big picture by a brain too small to think critically, in other words that’s the premise of a liberal.
so, you can eat a dick while you empower govt to define and control more of our lives.
congrats on your de-evolution into becoming a lefty.
“Speed kills, or at least it used to…” —starfcker
Your premise is flawed star. Speed has never killed anyone. Ever. What kills people is human flesh meeting immovable objects. If speed or speeding killed you, then anyone who exceeded the arbitrary government speed limit signs would die. Race car drivers would similarly suffer instantaneous death as a result of their profession. Pilots too. If flying at 600 MPH isn’t speeding, I don’t know what is.
We as humans can never eliminate death. It is part of the human condition. Yes, we can help reduce deaths with safety features. But should we be able to make that choice as “free” people? Aren’t you tired of being told what to do for your own good? I am.
I’ll admit I was in a similar accident. I lost control of my truck during an ice storm and hit a concrete barrier head on. My airbag saved my ass. The accident was over in seconds. The only thing I noticed was my nose tingling from the airbag. Had it not been for that canvass balloon , I would have eaten that steering wheel. But if I had my choice, I wouldn’t have had airbags and I might have been permanently maimed. But it would have been my choice. I would have nobody to blame but myself and I would have lived with it.
Gimme a fucken break. Stop being so literal just to make a point.
Of course “speed” doesn’t kill. “Speed” doesn’t even have opposable thumbs!
Every human reading “speed kills” absolutely knows what is meant; — That the END RESULT of having an accident when driving fast is worse than when driving slow.
Here’s what I want you to do. Drive up your driveway and run into your garage at 1 mph. Backup … put the pedal to the metal and hit your garage door. Please report your results regarding the two different speeds.
O’ Wise One The Stuckster, hear me.
For the record, I didn’t thumbs down you. I make the distinction because saying speed kills is intellectually lazy and is based in collectivist drivel. It’s the same as saying cars kill, or guns kill. The fact is, accidents happen at low speeds as well. Here’s the deal. Idiots that can’t control their car at ANY SPEED kills. It’s important to know the difference because it changes the dynamic of the argument. The Autobahn works because German drivers know what the fuck they’re doing. Americans are too fucking timid to drive like the germans because they have been brainwashed into believing that “speed kills”.
Stuckster speaks:
“Here’s what I want you to do. Drive up your driveway and run into your garage at 1 mph. Backup … put the pedal to the metal and hit your garage door. Please report your results regarding the two different speeds.”
Let the morons travel at 1 MPH. I have places to go and I don’t want to spend what little time I have on this earth behind fucking slow ass cowards afraid to do 10 MPH over a fucking sign. Get the fuck outta my way and stay in the slow lane.
There are two fucking rules that dumb mother fuckers and selfish assholes refuse to abide. That is, LEFT LANE IS FOR PASSING ONLY and SLOWER TRAFFIC KEEP THE FUCK RIGHT. If people just followed those two simple rules, which is the fucking law in most states, traffic would flow freeeeeeeeely. Why is it so fucking hard?
“Safe cars don’t require the government.” ——— Dude
As much as it pains me to say this for I LOATHE this government — and I am sure to get thumbs down — but, I disagree with you.
Remember that it would have cost Ford something like just five bucks to fix the exploding gas tank issue on the Pinto. Why didn’t they fix it? Because they literally had some fukstick “run the numbers” and calculated that settling lawsuits was cheaper than saving human lives. So, you’re asking me to rely on money-loving evil bastards to “do the right thing” regrading safety … cuz the “market” demands it? I don’t think so.
So, while my distrust of the gooberment is exceedingly high …. my distrust of Big Biz is equally as high, if not higher. #BusinessProfitsMatter !! Human lives? Pfffft!
Stucky –
Fair point.
I share your distrust of Big Biz. Freedom is not without its hazards. It is a risk I’m willing to live with given the alternative.
Some of those folks who continued to buy the “incredible exploding pinto” were hard luck cases where they had to take a calculated risk of cheap transportation vs likelihood of death. Some of them were just Darwin culling the herd.
(This is all from memory, before the internet where I read ink on paper)
The Pinto was Lee Iaccoca’s “under $2000 under 2000 lbs” dream.
Ford had the original patent on the part that prevents most (not all obviously) gas tank explosions on impact. It all started when a Ford VP in 1965 rear ended a car during a rainstorm and watched the occupants burn to death. He went straight to the engineers and told them to design whatever it takes to eliminate that type of explosion. And they did.
The part weighed 13 pounds and put the Pinto over 2000 pounds so they eliminated it from the design. I have no idea if they ran the numbers on lawsuits. That was made the twist in the movie “Class Action” (1991) with Gene Hackman.
“Because they literally had some fukstick “run the numbers” and calculated that settling lawsuits was cheaper than saving human lives.”
Let us suppose that that is true. Why was it cheaper to settle a lawsuit? Because the people who were responsible for the decisions did not have to pay out of their own pockets or with their own freedom. The corporation took the rap.
If I am a baker and sell 1000 pies, knowing that three of them accidentally got rat poison in them, not only do I have to pay whatever the courts demand, but I will probably serve time for voluntary manslaughter (or worse.) Not so with most big corporations. Corporations are (for all practical purposes) given get-out-of-jail-free cards for their officers.
Wells Fargo apparently created 2,000,000 fake accounts. Why aren’t the WF executives being charged with 2,000,000 counts of felony fraud? Would they have allowed that sort of fraud if they were held to the same standards as you and me?
Ford did not make exploding gas tanks because of lack of governmental safety regulations; Ford made exploding gas tanks because the government allowed them to be incorporated.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Pinto#Subsequent_analysis
Well, I am glad that my memory was at least accurate. I did not think to look at wikipedia.
Keep in mind, Stucky, that the lawsuits were only cheaper than fixing the part in a government controlled legal system that perverts everything. In a free market, stateless system, the lawsuits could very well be much much higher than the cost of fixing the part. It’s really important to remember that free market principles only truly work in a free market.
starfcker
At what point is there TOO MUCH safety mandated by government?
There are new cars now on the road that will actually brake for you when the sensors “sense” a [supposed] impending collision. Is that what you want forced on you?
GPS can now locate where your car is within ten feet …. also available (I’m sure) is data regarding what the speed limit is on that road. So, let’s say I’m on I-80 doing 75mph in PA. The systems knows that the speed limit on I-80 in Pennsylvania is 55mph and so the car brakes down to that speed. Is that what you want forced on you?
I don’t think anyone in their right mind would be against seat belts or air bags. I think what people are concerned about is the government going fucking nuts with laws (and accompanying fines & punishments) supposedly making us safe.
i get what you are saying about govt vs big biz. they both suck but big biz often garners much of its power via govt’s power. it’s an argument of the lesser evil but i’d argue one can be avoided while the other insists via force to be a part of our existence.
i’m 100% pro seatbelt but 100% anti seat belt laws (same thing with MC helmets and helmet laws). its a yielding of rights but also personal responsibility. govt making itself responsible for our safety via setting the standards makes them (and in turn us the taxpayer) liable for when those standards fail. And when people are less personally responsible, they become less responsible people. i think the last couple of decades is proof of that.
it also creates a situation where more police are required to enforce such mandates/laws. with more police there are more interactions that take place and the hiring of more cops requires a pool being tapped with lesser than ideal mindsets and skillsets.
starfcker, i disagree with you. Why not just let the market dictate it? You want to buy a very safe 15 airbag car, go ahead. I don’t want to, but yet I can’t delete 15 airbags, etc…..
And who’s to say that a 75 Olds wouldn’t have done just fine in your example. It’s looks to me like the barricade was collapsible. All good stuff, so is 15 airbags. It really is crony-capitalism though, otherwise, we’d be buying $10K cars from asia that would have met our ‘older’ regulations by now.
I’m astonished, but I agree with the Stuckmeister comments.
The problem is gov’t over-reach. It never stops. Once Gov’t accomplishes the job, do they shut down the dept. or reduce staff to ensure the results are maintained – NO. Every dept. wants to get bigger; more POWER and INfluence. So, we must INVENT new items to regulate, however fucking ridiculous the regulation may be (see VW).
There’s to many safety regulations but after you have seen the kind of wrecks I have over the years you understand why.The first year I was driving I come upon accidents where people had been killed . Two were still in their car as I ran up to see if I could help. Horrible sight seeing people torn up with no life left.
@ bb…..I seen some bad shit in my driving career as well.
It seems to me that the two main causes of preventable accidents is fatigue and driving too fast for conditions.
The .gov and the car makers and all the do-gooder’s in the world can add as many gizmos and gadgets to a car they want, but it won’t make the person driving any smarter or instill in them a sense of personal responsibility.
so there’s a problem and govt intervention is going to fix it?
safety mandates by the govt will have the same effect as poverty and anti-discrimination laws have had on fighting poverty and “raycism”.
can’t wait for driverless cars, that’ll be greaaaat…
this just in: if govt tries to fix something, they will make it worse
in other news: stupid people will continually insist on govt fixing things
This is a good thread….and a nice post Star.
Government imposed safety standards save a lot of lives that would otherwise be lost. It also creates massive bureaucratic bloat in a keystone industry. Like Stuck said how much is too much?
Of course, its a minor thing. If I could keep auto safety rules exactly as they are, yet take away the governments ability to spend trillions of dollars bombing people I have never met in lands I will never see, keep its own populace under constant surveillance and wage never ending wars against abstractions (poverty, drugs, terror, etc.) then we can talk about this trivial portion of the liberty vs tyranny debate.
Lysander the deprived , fatigue and speeding are the cause of most driving accidents. I would also add being distracted is another cause. Like talking on phone or texting .Very dangerous to do in any vehicle.
Starfcker, a bit off topic but it looks like those South Florida roads are gonna get pretty conjested as Matthew bears down. It’s not looking good. Stay safe. You might want to di di……good luck
“The part weighed 13 pounds and put the Pinto over 2000 pounds so they eliminated it from the design. I have no idea if they ran the numbers on lawsuits. That was made the twist in the movie “Class Action” (1991) with Gene Hackman.”
——— taodnt
====================================
This should give you a better idea.
“But at the time, management’s attitude was to get the product out the door as fast as possible. So, Ford did a cost-benefit analysis. To fix the problems would cost an additional $11 per vehicle, and Ford weighed that $11 against the projected injury claims for severe burns, repair-costs claim rate and mortality. The total would have been approximately $113 million (including the engineering, the production delays and the parts for tens of thousands of cars), but damage payouts would cost only about $49 million, according to Ford’s math. So the fix was nixed, and the Pinto went into production in September 1970. ——- Popular Mechanics
http://www.popularmechanics.com/cars/a6700/top-automotive-engineering-failures-ford-pinto-fuel-tanks/
Thanks for the insight
Thank you for not calling me a government loving asshole.
You are welcome.
If lawmakers and regulators truly wanted to save lives they would mandate that all vehicle bumpers have a uniform height and passenger compartments be reinforced accordingly. A standard location and method of operation for seatbelt releases is pretty obvious too.
I see Eric’s point but I’m not quite sold. In fact my old lady hit a pig in our Jetta at about 50Mph and her neck is still bothering her 6 months later because of the airbag. It broke one of her thumbs and sprained the other. She went off the road because she couldn’t see but fortunately got the car under control and didn’t hit anything. In her specific case she would have been much better off without airbags. That said, I would not even consider buying a new car that didn’t have airbags. I’m not happy about it being forced on me but I’m far more upset about self driving cars being forced on me. Obama committed to give over a million dollars a day for the next ten years to the self driving car cause. If it is so fucking great then let the car companies sort it out on their own dime and let consumers who want self driving cars pay all the associated costs.
And forcing carmakers to design hoods so they give more cushion to slow pedestrians is far more ridiculous to me than airbags or even automatic braking (my wife is a terrible tailgater).
Anyway, Eric’s other gripe is that the weight these safety systems add takes away from the vehicles efficiency. The numbers don’t lie. Cars are heavier than they were back when they were made with solid American steel. I don’t understand how it is possible that a few airbags and some reinforcement in the roof overcomes all the weight lost by using aluminum and plastics in modern cars? Better engineering, construction methods and metallurgy should shed quite a bit of weight too. I know that vehicles have more horsepower today and that would add weight but that couldn’t be much. I can’t believe that in order to double horsepower over 50 years engineers needed to double the weight of the motor. What am I missing?
Meso
I was wondering about your stats, and then I found this;
“The average new car or light-duty truck sold in the 2003 model year tipped the scales at 4,021 pounds, breaking the two-ton barrier for the first time since the mid-1970’s, according to a report released by the Environmental Protection Agency last week.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/05/business/average-us-car-is-tipping-scales-at-4000-pounds.html?_r=0
Wow.
I bought a 1959 Buick my first year in the USAF … I thought it was a monster car, made of real steel, and enormous bumpers …. just went to a Buick web page and come to find out it weighed in at 4,400 pounds …… almost as much as the average car with all its plastic and shit. Again, wow … and an eye-opener for me.
It’s all the cup-holders…
This article is the type of mantra I would expect to read from a liberal rag like the New York Slimes. The mandates are for you safety. Choice is bad, safety is good. Give into all the dangerous choices you may encounter in a free world so that Big Brother can take care of you. Garbage. This type of thinking is a mental disease called Liberalism. Don’t burden yourself with critical thinking and the ability to choose just join the safety brigade because in the end you don’t have any other option.
blah blah blah blah
The one sentence I highlighted about modern cars …….. “breaking the two-ton barrier for the first time since the mid-1970’s,” …… is either a fact, or a lie.
The fact that NY Slimes is a libtard rag is irrelevant.
Most safety mechanisms never get used. They end up in the junkyard. Some parts get salvaged, but most dont. This is a multi hundred billion dollar malinvestment. Who knows what type of safety mechanisms the free market might come up with. We can never know because of all the resources shunted into government safety mandates. For all we know, if we went back in time 50 years and didnt mandate anything, we could very well have safer and less expensive cars today. It is NOT an axiom that government mandates move a market in a direction any more efficiently than it could have on its own.
The government never mandated that televisions be a certain resolution or have a remote control. And yet today we have 8K tv’s and they can even be controlled by your phone. Had the government mandated every tv be at least 1080p back in 2006, I would bet that today a lot more tv’s would still be 1080p, and they would certainly be more expensive since the hypothetical 2006 1080p mandate would have jacked up prices stifling mass adoption.
The safety mandates are a way to remove liability from the automakers. The automakers pass along the cost of the additional safety measures to the end customer. They also avoid the cost of lawsuits because they cannot be found to be at fault because they followed the mandated “safety measures”. This is a feature of the corporatocracy.
Gents, and ladies. I don’t know about this stuff. I can reject FORD cars
tho, and I have other reasons than the pinto basterds.
I really am just curious about what my icon will be.
A few things said are excellent! Slower traffic: Stay Right
Drive for conditions, do not drive if impaired. (that includes fatigued)
And do not play with phones or gadgets while driving!!
Edit: I am going to get a frog! Pepe, my Pal, God of Chaos.
Change that to God of Fun.
Thanks for the comments, guys. Hate to disapoint, but no statist fantasies involved here. Just amazement and appreciation that you can piledrive a concrete abuttment at 70 mph in some non descript jap car and walk away. Great stuff, if you ask me. That poor dude didn’t have two seconds to react. He lifted off and boom. Could have been any of us. And even the morons among us would have been glad to headed home in one piece. That I can guarantee.
I keep seeing this push for driverless cars.I guess so people can text and all the other stupid things they do now.But not get distracted by actually driving the car.
the idea that govt can keep us safe leads to this utter nonsensical ideal.
yes, folks, their goal is zero, a goal so stupid only a govt drone would propose it. this is where statism leads…
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/feds-set-goal-no-traffic-deaths-within-30-years/ar-BBx1F1U