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Comment by temporallobe | Hacker News Reader

Car guy here. Yeah, I’m with you. My favorite car was a ‘96 Tercel with mechanical steering and a 4-speed manual. It even had manual roll-up windows. It had less than 100 HP, but it was simple as hell to operate, very fun to drive, cheap to maintain, and extremely reliable up until I sold it with nearly 400k miles on the odo. I put an aftermarket stereo and speakers in it and I was set. Only reason I sold it was because my wife hated it and a friend needed a cheap reliable car for his idiot son who proceeded to neglect and destroy it quickly after taking possession.

Modern cars are absolutely terrible in the UX department, but they are a hell of a lot safer, so there’s that.

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Those mid 90s Japanese sedans were awesome. Relatively compact overall, zippy little 4 cylinders engines and manual transmissions. I had an Accord from that era, and loved driving my dads nerdy-as-hell Nissan Sentra. That car was shockingly fun to drive.

I still drive my '94 Lexus. California is kind in that way.

92 Civic owner here. Love my car.

Mid 90s Accords were incredibly long lasting.

Just sold my 1990 Bluebird. Didn't pass warrant of fitness, but otherwise drove amazingly well.

1990 mx5 still going! It's a good car though a little rust. The only thing I miss from more modern cars is the engines are a bit more efficient in modern ones - more power less fuel.

Re electronics the sound system and sat nav (iphone) are boxes you tack on and don't have to be part of the car.

> "Modern cars are absolutely terrible in the UX department, but they are a hell of a lot safer, so there’s that."

tangentially, "safety" is highly cargo-culted. things that seem so obviously safer are taken without question as better, but in many cases, such features really only provide a false sense of security along with substantive unintended consequences.

most safety features in cars (e.g., lane-keeping) allow people to be less skilled and less attentive at driving, rather than lowering crash/injury/death rates. the better solution is to make people better and more attentive at driving through more rigorous training/testing, more thoughtful design, and importantly, culture, rather than just technology for its own sake.

Modern cars have more design features that improve crash survivability (better airbags, better crumple zones, tested with more realistic crash tests, etc). Those seem like a pretty unalloyed improvement to me.

I'm not saying you're wrong about the things you mentioned, but cars really have got safer, in important ways.

yes, airbags and crumple zones do improve safety, but even those are not without negative consequences, like bigger, heavier vehicles (which is more dangerous to others) and higher sense of psychological safety leading to being less considerate, less attentive, and more reckless.

that's not to argue that those tradeoffs aren't net positive, but that they're still tradeoffs to be considered, rather than short-circuiting to "of course it's better!".

Do you have any evidence for these claims? This just feels like luddism to me.

The "bigger, heavier" part does indeed seem to be a tradeoff. It's been blamed for a significanted rise in pedestrian fatalities, even as vehicles get safer for the people inside.

One source, just after a quick search: https://www.ghsa.org/resources/Pedestrians20

I'd argue feeling safe when I drive is net positive for actual safety. Stressed drivers going to make way more errors.

if you’re prone to being overwhelmed by stress while driving a machine that can potentially kill you, that’s a sign to get more training, not to mollify oneself with an illusion of safety. ignorance is not bliss in this case.

if you’re prone to stress while driving a machine that can potentially kill you, that’s a sign you are aware of your predicament

Have you ever seen how stressed out drivers behave?

We've all seen that person in a Honda fit who's so terrified of being on the freeway during rush hour they're driving like an overloaded scrap hauler and generally causing a problem in whatever lane they're in.

That doesn't make the roads safer.

Exactly this. I cannot sum this up better. In NZ the police fine such people occasionally, I think there was a case when one such driver caused massive traffic jam during national holiday.

Unless you crash into something going highway speed a car from 1990 or 1980 is fine as long as you're wearing a seatbelt.

The states look good because safety tech that only matters at the extreme end has improved so the drunks and distracted teenager who would have dies had they gone off a cliff in a 20-30yo car are now surviving.

Basically the medium to low speed impacts that people not behaving particularly poorly get into have always been highly survivable.

This is too dismissive of the many ways people get into accidents. I got t-boned by someone who blew past a stop sign on a residential road. Side curtain airbags prevented me from hitting my head on my side window.

> rather than lowering crash/injury/death rates.

Motor vehicle deaths per 100,000 have been on a consistent downward trend since the 70s (1.53 per 100,000 in 2000, 1.11 per 100,000 in 2019), so, no, death rates have in fact been lowered.

Those are two different stats - parent was referring to if those features lower death rates. You are looking at total death rates regardless of features.

It’s also possible better road maintenance, or airbags, or better crumple zones (but not lane help) are driving it down. It’s possible for lane help to be driving it up, just not as much as say better crumple zones, and it will still be trending down.

How much of that is due to faster ambulance/helicopter service, improved emergency room practices?

Probably a lot less than the generations who grew up when it was acceptable to drive drunk and/or not wear your seatbelt aging out.

For anyone wondering what progress in terms of safety looks like, give this 77 second video a view: https://youtu.be/xtxd27jlZ_g

This is a great video that everyone should watch.

But part of the problem with the 50 y/o car may be that the steel has rusted (based on the rust-colored cloud of particles). That may be why the older car just disintegrates.

OTOH the weakening of the steel because of rust creates a de-facto "crumple zone"? A minor improvement? :)

Older cars were much too rigid and the body didn't absorb much energy. It was all transmitted to the occupants.

Also, forgetting about design improvements in safety, I'm not sure I want to "bet my life" on 50 year old brake lines, etc. That sort of stuff just wears out.

The nice thing about those cars is that you can actually replace things like suspension and brake systems with modern equivalents relatively easily. It’s not like swapping in an F-150 brake system into a Corolla.

As far as rust, I’m sure you can find some rust free cars in AZ or CA.

God I hate that video so much. It is right up there with the Top Gear Hilux episode when it comes to entertainment being peddled as scientific experiment by people who find it convenient to the point they are trying to make to do so (not saying you did that, just that tons of people do). It was a promotional video designed to highlight progress. It does that just fine. But every two bit tom dick and harry seems to think it's representative of a crash between any old car and any new car when the vehicle in the video doesn't even have seat-belts (!!!!) which are the single biggest improvement to crash safety/survivability ever.

There's a reason nobody is going to do a crash test of a 1980s Ford cop car into a 2010s Ford cop car. It would be a massive nothingburger.

Frontal airbags do little for seatbelted passengers at crash test speeds (texting into the back of a semi at 70mph is a different story). In fact in many cases they are worse than no airbag at low/medium speeds because you injure your face hitting airbag or are injured in its deployment in situations where you would have otherwise hit nothing. They are intended as damage control for unbelted passengers (which is where do you think the first S in SRS comes from).

Crumple zones are highly overrated. Imagine an old cartoon where someone gets thrown off a building and happens to land on a guy carrying mattresses. That's basically how crumple zones work. Too high of a jump or too soft of a mattress and you blow right through with negligible deceleration. Too hard of a mattress and the mattress decelerates you basically as hard a the sidewalk. Crumple zones provide time for the airbag to deploy, yes but they only really mitigate the forces on the passenger cabin (and its occupants) at a narrow speed range (they shoot for the speed of the relevant crash tests).

For people who were doing things right and wearing their seatbelt the safety of crashing a car changed negligibly from the advent of the 3pt belt to the time of the side curtain airbag. (I'm ignoring rollover safety here, that's been a basically linear improvement since the 1960s but it's not technically interesting because it's a simple case of throwing more and more steel at the problem)

Side curtain airbags have been a major improvement because there's not much restraint nor space for deceleration in that direction. They do a great job keeping people's heads from hitting stuff.

AEB is another good modern one. Knocking 5-20mph off the speed of a collision helps a lot no matter how you cut it.

All that said, everyone who worships safety tech uncritically as though they're all big improvements you can stack on top of each other and get the sum of them all needs to take a long walk off a short pier. Professing your love for airbags and crumple zones might get you fake internet points on Reddit or HN but that's just not how it works and those people pollute and/or prevent legitimate discussion.

I get what you are saying but look at what happened to the 60s car here. Seatbelts don’t do anything for you if the other car is suddenly parked in your pelvis. None of the hard parts seem to reach at least the torso of the dummy in the modern car while in the 60s car the dummy ends up being pushed virtually into the back seat. Sure the seatbelt would have held it in the seat but it that does nothing as the bent door and the grill of the modern car crushed it’s lungs and liver areas. The airbag here wouldn’t have saved the dummy either of course. The thing that would have is a better crumple zone.

> things that seem so obviously safer are taken without question as better, but in many cases, such features really only provide a false sense of security along with substantive unintended consequences

This is not true at all. There is definitely testing of cars by groups like the NHTSA and Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. For example, they've found crash rates were 14% lower on cars with blind-spot monitoring. Modern cars are far safer than older cars.

Most safety features are nothing like lane assist. Lane assist is not a representative example of what most safety features in a care look like. Most safety features are crumple hoods and pillars, safety glass, airbags and seatbelts.

Additionally, you think it is a more feasible solution to change culture than to make the safe operation of a car less reliable on the human element? How exactly do you "make people better and more attentive?" Training? Please elaborate on what that would look like.

Cars are designed a lot more thoughtfully than they used to be. An example not related to safety is cupholders. Remember when two flat rings on the dash were considered acceptable for holding a cup? Safety wise I'd say designing contingencies against inattentive drivers is thoughtful design.

The "spewing BS is order to show the world how much you care about safety" part of the safety cargo cult bothers me a hell of a lot more than safety features enabling less attentive behavior.

If I had a nickle for every social media user who's screeching about how airbags are all that's good in the world but who doesn't understand the inherent tradeoffs to a bag of dense air occupying the space in front of the driver or how a crumple zone is basically a single use spring I would use the money to hire people to beat the first group of people over the head with highshcool physics textbooks.

I wish we'd regress to '50s attitudes about safety simply so that the people who care about safety no longer have to be held back by the people who crap all over everything by wanting to be seen caring about safety.

yes, it's frenzy, a typically pro-social behavior (agreeableness) that's misapplied due to fear and uncertainty, so that we get counterintuitive consequences from overly correlated belief/behavior.

it's the same impulse that got us mis-masking and lockdowns, when the real danger was inter-/intra-familial contact (because that contact is prolonged and our guards are down, unlike with "stranger danger").

happens all too often, and it's frustrating to watch otherwise perceptive and reasonable people forsake those facilities for primal herd behavior.

I have a 97 Miata and a 95 4Runner. Both high mileage, both amazing cars mechanically. They both have power steering and power windows but everything works on both cars: every knob, button, window, still works. I've had several newer cars that have degraded much more quickly than these two. Both cars are much better to drive IMO than newer cars, with some caveats. You can't drive like a dummy and expect these older cars to kick in computerized traction control systems to save you from yourself. I personally like a car that lets me be the driver.

>My favorite car was a ‘96 Tercel with mechanical steering and a 4-speed manual. It even had manual roll-up windows.

I had a 1993 Tercel, same gearbox, manual windows, vinyl interior. It had a leaking head gasket when I bought it, and I drove it for 150,000 km without putting a dime into it outside of oil changes and tires, filling the coolant as needed. Simple cars are basically indestructible.

Counterpoint, I'm not a car guy and I think too many people own them. But when I'm in a car my priorities are safety, mileage, seat comfort, climate control, sound quality, and smartphone support. I don't really care how much it costs to maintain, and I haven't changed my own oil in over a decade.

Modern cars are fine in the UX for what I do. I'd rather not own a car than drive manual, and even vehicles from 10 years ago aren't competitive in creature comforts or gasoline consumption.

I find it more stressful to drive automatic. You need to be more careful with the gas pedal to get just the right amount of acceleration, since too much will make the car shift down and rev up. Also there is the risk of uncontrolled acceleration by mixing up the gas and brake pedal and not having the clutch as a double safe.

>gasoline consumption.

That's only true if we talk about hybrids.

>even vehicles from 10 years ago aren't competitive in creature comforts

That depends a lot on your priorities, I drive a nearly 20 year old premium car that holds up very well against many new cars

The mid-90's Toyotas were wonderfully reliable vehicles but the plastic parts are failing.

Maybe I'll give up and dive into retro cars fully with a post-war Citroen 2CV? Naah!

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