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Comment by nimbius | Hacker News Reader

Im in automotive maintenance and repair as a trade, and a 12 year old car is no problem for anyone but the people at the wall street journal in my opinion.

how long you keep a car is your decision. if you like it, and you're willing to pay for regular maintenance, then keep it. this "long run" comparison of owning and repairing versus buying a new car is just silly. So many people have the incentive to get you to buy a new car, but practically no one has an incentive to tell you to take good care of the things you own so they last.

And new cars arent always better. That nice collision avoidance/lane keeper and camera system? that was implemented as a countermeasure for increasing A and B pillar size after regulatory agencies decided too many americans were getting crushed to death in roll-over accidents. collision avoidance was literally the only way auto manufacturers could keep you out of a manslaughter charge thanks to the absolute byzantine nightmare of info-tainment systems that also do things like climate control.

controversial opinion here but older cars teach you a healthy fear of operating a 2000lb rolling death machine. no infofainment means they are safer for the driver, and no nanny-state A pillars mean you arent doing 80 in a 65 quite as often.

I own a 2000 mercury grand marquis. its a v8 so it inspires me to bipedal transportation pretty often with its fuel enconomy. the biggest problem I have with the car is my coworkers nicknaming me "the don" for driving a murdered-out land yacht but its what i like.

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> controversial opinion here but older cars teach you a healthy fear of operating a 2000lb rolling death machine. no infofainment means they are safer for the driver, and no nanny-state A pillars mean you arent doing 80 in a 65 quite as often.

Yes, because that's how people work. Nobody was driving unsafely before, because they were afraid of their cars rolling over.

No, that's not how they work. They just died at higher rates.

Would you look at that!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...

Turns out unsafe cars killed more people and when we started making them really safe, they stopped killing as many people, despite people driving more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...

You conveniently ignore pedestrian fatalities, which are headed off the chart thanks to modern "safer" vehicles.

From the same article you referenced:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...

That graph also correlates perfectly with smartphone adoption. Drivers are more distracted and pedestrians less aware of their surroundings than in the past.

Tall SUV and trucks + smartphones. One battle at a time.

Tech companies have the power to end the smartphone problem overnight. Just takes Apple and Google disabling the screen of any phone moving faster than 5mph.

Passengers would be inconvenienced, but basically every phone-related crash would be prevented.

People on buses, trains, ferries, and planes would also be inconvenienced.

Yes, they would have to return to pre-2010 life while being transported. Not exactly a huge cost compared to the number of lives saved when it’s almost entirely entertainment.

Yes, we should severely inconvenience people who are _doing the right thing_ by taking public transit so that bad drivers who can't stop checking their phones won't main/kill themselves and others.

Going without a smartphone on transit is not a severe inconvenience. It’s a very minor one. Just a few years ago nobody even knew they needed one.

Snapchat was not worth my cousin's life.

Google and Apple are already tracking the bus/train/ferry through their mapping software. Wouldn't be hard to set up a crude geofilter and guestimate whether a user was on transit or not. Some transit agencies even integrate directly with the phone's wallet system, so you could measure that a fare was paid concievably.

Not in most of the world where the buses or trains are running disconnected from a public network

YOu assume that only drivers are the problem with cell phone

More than a few pedestrians walk and use their phone, walk right out in the traffic, or other situations (some hilarious walking right into poles and getting laughed at on the internet.

I know in a few nations this may be a hard concept, but here in the US, it is absolutely NOT true that "pedestrians always have the right of way"... no no no

Pedestrians always have the right to not be run over.

“Right” is a strange word here, but there are absolutely cases where pedestrians have no right-of-way over cars.

In these cases, you can be run over and you (or your family) will have no legal recourse against the driver. Zero, nada, zilch. So in the legal sense, it is not true that a pedestrian always has the right to exist at any point on the earth without being run over.

In a moral sense, perhaps every driver has an obligation to try not to run over pedestrians. That might create a “right” in some moral/ethics frameworks, but it doesn’t exist as a legal concept in my state.

If you don't mind sharing some examples I'd love to hear them, out of curiosity more than anything. Which situations (and in which country/countries) do pedestrians not have right-of-way over cars?

In America, at least in same States, pedestrians only have a right of way in a sidewalk or crosswalk. I all also add, stepping in front of a moving vehicle means having to obey the laws of physics.

They only have the right of way in a crosswalk WHEN they have the walk symbol. If a pedestrian enters a cross walk under a don't walk symbol they do not have the right of way.

In most countries that I know of (throughout Europe, the US, Japan), if you're on the road as a pedestrian, there's no law that protects you in case you get hit by a vehicle, it's considered your fault as a pedestrian.

The exceptions are street crossings or purely pedestrian streets, which have to be marked as such.

I don't expect this to be different anywhere in the world, since most paved roads are paved for vehicles, you don't really need pavement that much for pedestrians (well, you kind of need it for pedestrian with baby strollers or wheeled luggage & co).

That's definitely not the case in France, a pedestrian always have right of way over anything else, even on the highway.

"Le piéton est l'usager le plus protégé par le code de la route : il a, quoiqu'il arrive, toujours la priorité sur la chaussée"

For the highway it's a bit trickier than you're describing:

> Pour un piéton victime d’un accident, on retiendra faute inexcusable s’il «franchit des glissières de sécurité pour traverser une voie à grande circulation (alors qu’un passage souterrain existe à côté)», s’il «fait un effort particulier pour braver les règles de sécurité», ou encore s’il «contourne délibérément les obstacles lui interdisant l’accès à une voie rapide» ;

In 99% of the cases a pedestrian would have to go over a barrier to end up on a highway, as part of regular traffic.

I'm not counting someone from a broken down car on the side of the road as a pedestrian, since those are covered by different laws.

Not unexpected but TIL ! Thanks - my driver license instructor had definitely told me that pedestrians were always the most important

Argentina for one.

It depends on the country. In Japan pedestrians have the always have right of way, no matter what.

Not only that but in any road accident the bigger participant is automatically the guilty party. So huge trucks are very very careful while grandma with her trolley of vegetables trundles merrily along.

If you step in front of a 2 ton hunk of metal moving at high speed, the laws of physics don't care about your rights.

Iwould think you would need to separate the rate of car-v-pedestrian accidents from injury-rate-given incident. You might even have to break down speed of incident to really understand if modern vehicles were actually safer or not.

Per that link, pedestrian fatalities had a sudden break in trend and skyrocketed right when motorcyclist deaths stopped climbing and flattened.

Wouldn't you expect the hypothesis of new vehicles increasing ped deaths show up in motorcycle fatalities too? It seems much more plausible from this baseline data that the introduction of the smartphone is more relevant: the skyrocketing happened at the precise time the smartphone took off, and smartphone ubiquity naturally wouldn't affect motorcyclist fatality (while new vehicle shapes would).

Of course, there are myriad other potential explanations, including the trend towards urbanization and walkable cities over the last decade and a half, but I don't see how you can conclude that the pedestrian fatality graph is useful evidence of the greater dangers of newer vehicle designs.

Which begs the real question: shouldn't we have continued to allow "driving a car well if you're going to be driving one" to have been a natural selection point...?

> That nice collision avoidance/lane keeper and camera system? that was implemented as a countermeasure for increasing A and B pillar size after regulatory agencies decided too many americans were getting crushed to death in roll-over accidents.

I don't buy this. It is simply a competitive advantage enabling those systems, plus being software-heavy, they do scale well. Thicker pillars are not a bad thing. Visibility is not appreciably limited by them either. If that was the case we would have a significant differential in crash statistics between the trims of the same cars with and without those systems. They would have different safety ratings.

> no infofainment means they are safer for the driver,

Unless you have data, I strongly doubt this too. No infotainment means people will handle their phone more often for navigation, music, calls etc. Stuff like CarPlay don't even allow time seeking sliders on music interfaces, they are much less distracting than full fidelity mobile interfaces.

> older cars teach you a healthy fear of operating a 2000lb rolling death machine

By that token motorcycles would teach you a healthy fear of operating without a chassis, and thus a safer vehicle?

>Thicker pillars are not a bad thing. Visibility is not appreciably limited by them either.

One Hundred Percent inaccurate. I can't see shit out of my 2014 crossover when turning to check blindspots, compared to my 90s trucks and cars I've driven. Hell, backup cameras are mandated on all new cars in the US (they are very useful, but it's also because you can't see out of your own car).

>By that token motorcycles would teach you a healthy fear of operating without a chassis, and thus a safer vehicle?

I think driving a motorcycle creates safer drivers, absolutely. I take the stance when driving, turning, merging, etc. that at any moment, any car near me is going to do something stupid. Either not see my lane-change signal, or cross the stop-sign despite it being my turn, etc.

Every person who has proactively described that level of defensive driving (that I have talked to in conversation) had at one point or another been a motorcycle rider.

> I can't see shit out of my 2014 crossover when turning to check blindspots

I learned to adjust my blind spot to be two lanes over so that I can see anything next to me in my mirrors. Checking my blindspot means looking directly out the window so that pillars don't get in the way. It's similar to how trucks do it, since they can't see out the back.

Something you may want to look into -- adjusting your blind spot so you don't have to look at your pillar.

> Thicker pillars are not a bad thing. Visibility is not appreciably limited by them either.

They really do! If you want to know what it's like transitioning from my 1980's compact SUV into my gf's 2021 compact SUV, don one of those cheap Halloween masks you wore as a kid and leave it on as you go about your business the rest of the day. Steel-toed shoes would make a great complement.

> By that token motorcycles would teach you a healthy fear of operating without a chassis, and thus a safer vehicle?

If you're referring to a perceived lack of concern for personal safety among a subset of motorcyclists, try handing one them the keys to a Bugatti Veyron and see if their behavior improves.

Psychological issues with this demographic aside, would you be willing to ride an ordinary bicycle at freeway speeds if you were able? If yes, do you think you would spend much time looking at your phone while doing so?

There’s a reason why heart surgeons have nicknamed motorcycles ”donor cycles”. An unprotective vehicle in the hands of a young male who doesn’t yet grasp his own mortality.

Joke’s on them, I opted out of organ donation.

"When I finished high school I wanted to take all my graduation money and buy myself a motorcycle. Buy my mom said no. See, she had a brother who died in a horrible motorcycle accident when he was 18. And I could just have his motorcycle."

-Anthony Jeselnik

As a motorcyclist, I would be sad to hear the story of the uncle's death. And I would gladly ride the bike.

The two are not necessarily connected except through premise.

> Stuff like CarPlay don't even allow time seeking sliders on music interfaces

Which I never understood, because it really just makes me want to pick up my phone and use the slider there, which is far more dangerous.

>I don't buy this. It is simply a competitive advantage enabling those systems,

Someone like you was probably saying the same thing about ABS on a BBS back in 1996.

These features get implemented in the higher end segments of the market and then adoption plateaus.

Most people are not going to spend thousands of dollars to have a marginally better chance of a avoiding a "less than once in a lifetime" type accident. ABS is even more useful than that and its adoption plateaued before the feds mandated it.

> Someone like you was probably saying the same thing about ABS on a BBS back in 1996.

Someone like me said ABS is purely a competitive advantage feature despite the fact that its adoption in mainstream cars struggled? That person must be rather incoherent.

> ABS is even more useful than that and its adoption plateaued before the feds mandated it.

Let's not overgeneralize the competitive advantage angle to all safety features, that would be strawmanning. Stuff like lane keep assist, adaptive cruise control are very different beasts than ABS. They have been popular features in no small part because they also offer comfort, and have luxurious connotations e.g. like Tesla's autopilot. Besides they've been cheaper to add at lower trims as defaults because like I said they are mainly software driven features and therefore the costs scale well, especially considering the vertical integration between luxury and mainstream car brands. E.g. it only costs the windshield camera and the 2 sensors to add the auto breaking feature to a Honda, when you already have the software of an Acura.

> a 12 year old car is no problem for anyone but the people at the wall street journal in my opinion

This was a weird statement since the article doesn’t seem to have any problem with people keeping cars longer.

Although I agree with OP, I also found this ironic:

> Im in automotive maintenance and repair

> but practically no one has an incentive to tell you to take good care of the things you own so they last.

As in, the press, the government, car manufacturers, or mechanics, really.

Mechanics would love you to buy cars that cost $2000 for a headlight change, rather than maintain your 2002 Honda with regular maintenance and responsible driving.

I’m not so sure. Look at a mechanic when they are tasked with certain jobs.

BMW X5 rear lights - specifically the fibre optic stuff.

Jaguar brakes, or cam belt (chain?) on the v12.

They seem pretty happy when my Corolla needs some work.

I have owned one car with a $2K+ headlight change (BMW - never again!) but the guy with the shop doing the work (a friend) is getting paid on the time for the job not the parts cost.

>how long you keep a car is your decision

You do repair work in the desert don't you? I mostly agree with your sentiment. However in the rust belt we spray corrosive agents all over our cars and within 5 years loosening half of the fasteners takes 10 times what you are probably familiar with.

Insightful. When I moved to California from Minnesota my cars were covered with “road cancer”. People looked at the rusted body panels like “What the heck is that? I’ve never seen that.” Now one of my cars is over 22 years old and still going just fine.

In my experience in the north, cars you drive in winter can get about 15-20 years before you really start to have body rust and things like brake lines start rusting out.

Right before the pandemic, I got rid of a 22 year old Honda del Sol. But it had been garaged for about the previous 10 winters. The mechanics at the dealer always went to look at it because they basically weren't on the roads any longer in New England.

I have a 2000 Jeep Cherokee that I bought from a friend at 25K miles in the Colorado mountains. It spent a handful of years there, a handful in Salt Lake City, a handful in Lake Tahoe, and another handful in Bellingham, WA, with many drives to Mt. Baker, of course :). She is at 190K and rusting but mechanics love telling me she is in great condition. Most reliable vehicle I have ever known. Simply won’t give up.

I sold my 96 last year with 318k miles on it. Ran perfectly.

It's around 325k now, I sold it to an acquaintance.

I ran into a local at the feed store who had one, and chatted him up. Turns out he has a whole little fleet of them. Easy to work on, run forever, cheap, and lots of spare parts around.

My wonder car is a 2000 Toyota Echo with 280,000 miles. It seems like magic that it keeps running. The maintenance has been oil, brakes, battery, ball joints, wheel bearings, shocks and struts and that's it.

I are had a series of corollas in the family. Even without maintenance they keep on going, a terrible thing to do but somehow they keep on going.

>The mechanics at the dealer always went to look at it because they basically weren't on the roads any longer in New England.

Can confirm this. Can't remember the last tine I saw a del Sol.

In California, one for sale a few blocks away.

This is why we should rotate car climates like we rotate tires.

Cars should operate for no more than 10 years per climate. It evens out the heat-death and salt-death processes for max lifespan.

Yeah, my tires are old, but they don’t sit in 105F sun either. None of my interior panels have curled up or dried out either. My (electric) coolant pump hasn’t died yet because, well, it doesn’t run as much.

Car tire rubber becomes dangerously degraded after about 6 years even if they're not sitting in the sun.

This is a tire salesman trope that the "I like to sound like I care about other people's safety because the internet gives me virtue points when I do that" crowd picked up and ran with.

Ask anyone who works in the tire industry outside of sales and they will tell you that unless your tire was really, really abused or sat in the desert sun all the time 6yr is nothing and you should inspect the tire if you want to get an idea of how degraded it is.

Source: friends at cooper.

Personal anecdote time: Over the last year I went through a two and a half sets of old tires that I accumulated over the years for my van. I was intentionally doing burnouts daily to get through old stock as I planned to (and did) get new ones once I exhausted the old stockpile.

The only tires that had noticeably hardened and performed poorly (but oh boy did they do good burnouts) were the newest of the bunch and from 2016. The oldest ones were from 2009 and the half set was from 2012.

Not sure about the ecology in the plains states but the salt is pretty terrible for our forests too.

Your comment reminded me of this video, "Why do mechanics buy 'grandma' cars?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNOEMEX-2ow

I like older grandma cars in an additional sense: they're usually low mileage, gently driven, garage kept, and well serviced because older people tend to take care of their cars so they last and also often don't use them that much.

Most all of my vehicles have been 10+ year old vehicles, gently used, and bought for a great price from some elderly person who no longer drives/can drive or from a relative selling their parents/grandparents old ugly car they inherited and don't want. The older designs are often geared at making them easily maintainable vs new designs. This is shifting a bit and you're not starting to get in the early 2000s unless you want to get something much much older.

You do have to worry about seals, gaskets, rubber parts that have dry-rotted/cracked etc. or start to fail but the rest of the vehicle is usually in fantastic shape from my experience. I see many vehicles 10+ years old with less than 50k miles on them. It's probably hard to find anything like this any more and I really hope the pandemic doesn't inspire everyone to start picking these older used options long term because then it's going to get more expensive for me to find good reliable cheap cars.

I've never heard this. Anywhere I can read more about this?

> controversial opinion here but older cars teach you a healthy fear of operating a 2000lb rolling death machine.

Sure. And what about adding a giant huge metal sharp spike in the windshield pointing directly to the driver's forehead, while we're at it. That should teach people to drive safely.

No need to be that dramatic.

Put a little one on the steering wheel aimed at your heart, primed for airbag insertion. :-P

I fall on the "safer stuff = safer" side of the equation, against the "safer stuff encourages more stupid" BTW.

I mean, my car has ABS and I could brake a lot later for every corner but the shuddering, squealing and G forces don't feel like a nice UX.

Are you referring to non-collapsible steering columns? After all before collapsible steering columns presumably, following along this threads logic, the fear of being impaled made crashes non-existant.

We can also remove the seat belts.

Oh and 500Hp 8,000lb pick up trucks with 6ft tall front grills don’t accelerate fast enough, let’s put Tesla’s plaid tech in them so they can get to 90mph in seconds. Currently there’s far too much lag when 8,000lb trucks hit the gas to weave through traffic at 95mph.

Presumable Making these updates will give people the proper fear they need in order to drive safer and reduce accidents.

> this "long run" comparison of owning and repairing versus buying a new car is just silly. So many people have the incentive to get you to buy a new car, but practically no one has an incentive to tell you to take good care of the things you own so they last.

I don't think the comparison is so absurd. The result can vary a lot based on where you live - how hard the weather is on the car, how much a mechanic charges per hour, how strict the smog/inspection regulations are.

In San Francisco maintenance/repairs are $150/hour at an independent shop. A former colleague and I worked out that the 10+ year old used cars we both drove ended up costing almost exactly the same in depreciation and maintenance as leasing a new Subaru Outback. They only worked out cheaper overall because we could forego the comprehensive insurance required for a lease.

I'd switched to a job that required commuting more than 15k miles a year by the time mine failed its smog test and needed to be replaced (a CARB compliant replacement catalytic converter would have been almost as much as I'd paid for the car) so got another old used car. He ended up leasing when his car died.

Speaking of the lack of software as a feature, are there any new cars you can still buy that aren’t bloated with software anti features?

I'm not aware of any, which is a shame. I want to replace one of my two cars with an EV sometime late 2022 or early 2023. Unfortunately they all come with touchscreens and cellular connectivity. I want neither.

My 2002 Saturn LW200 had the best UI of any car I've ever owned. Everything was a mechanical button, lever, or knob and it had only two very-simple screens: a clock radio (segment LCD) and an odometer (VFD).

I suspect the only long term way to avoid touchscreens and cellular is a DIY EV. EVWest, for example, now has complete kits for 14 cars: https://www.evwest.com/catalog/index.php?cPath=40

Anything by Dacia. You don't even get a radio as standard equipment. I imagine a 20-year-old Mercedes has more lines of code than a Dacia.

Do you see them as anti-features? My mom's newish car has backup cameras, lane guidance, and blindspot detectors, and those things alone have quieted the vast majority of my lifelong frustration at cities that force you to waste hours of your day piloting death machines just to go about your day-to-day. I still would never want to _live_ somewhere like that, but my visits to my parents have become significantly more pleasant through what I consider to be these common-sense safety features.

You can't avoid CANBUS anymore but if you go buy the base trim subcompacts from those brands the well to do parts of the internet turn up their noses at you should be able to find stuff without much or any technical bloat.

>and no nanny-state A pillars mean you arent doing 80 in a 65 quite as often.

I'm curious about this, can you explain more?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_compensation

The more likely you are to survive putting the car on it's roof, the less you think about avoiding it.

Right. The same logic that says bike helmets lead to more deaths because people drive more risky. Which I guess is great until you get t-boned by someone you don’t see coming and just die because you didn’t have a $20 helmet on.

Car drivers are also taking less care when encountering a cyclist with a helmet on. People weirdly tend to put others into greater risk when assuming others are protected, which in case of cyclists is clearly false.

I’m not sure why this comment is being downvoted. There are multiple papers showing drivers are less safe around helmeted bike riders. Here’s one: https://psyarxiv.com/nxw2k.

It can be both true and bad advice. It’s bad advice to preach against helmets as they are an excellent safety device.

This is strange, is there any major flaws to the study because anecdotally seeing helmet/no helmet does not consciously effect my driving near cyclists.

Why am I being downvote? I asked about the caveats of a research paper to someone who read it, a task that takes considerable time. Since I got not informative reply, I did read it and apparently this is a controversial topic with papers going both ways although for the areas studied it does look like it’s a true effect, but I have questions about how universal it is across different areas.

I come back to my original anecdote, helmets is not something that consciously effects my driving. Not only that, unless a road biker biking for exercise is going super chill, it’s hard to notice the a helmet or not. And second, the prevalence of helmets, the prevalence of bikers and the regional road layout all probably effect general driving behaviors around hikers. I’m skeptical this effect is universal, but sure it apparently happened in the area of Europe under conditions studied.

This isn’t even the original paper, but one responding to another paper saying the original paper was wrong. I can’t read that original paper because it’s paywalled.

From skimming the article it looks like the effect is not even at p of 0.05. But i was a bit unclear on what exactly that p value was referring to and whether they had also tested many other hypothesis after the fact, a p-hacking issue.

There’s many questions I have about the road and locations and regional factors.

First, the comment refuted evidence based on data via personal anecdotes. Second the anecdote’s assumptions were flawed. Unless one believes most drivers are psychopaths, one would not expect drivers to consciously endanger bike riders (especially since a helmet is unlikely to provide any protection from being run over.)

1) discarding individual data points because they disagree with a desired result is fraudulent science

2) Road rage and resentment against bikers is real. There many drivers that act as psychopaths and will yell and haze bikers.

3) had people read the study before downvoting they would realize the study itself state it was a hotly contested topic and was in fact a response to another paper claiming they were wrong.

I don’t think someone asking if there is flaws to that study is someone that should be downvoted.

While I can understand that with something visible and/or obvious like seatbelts, airbags and anti-lock brakes, does the average driver have any idea how safe their car is in a rollover collision? I have a 2003 and a 2020 car, and from the outside, the A-pillars look the same. (from the inside, the 2020 A-pillar looks bigger, but I always assumed that was because it has an airbag). I certainly couldn't tell you which one would be safer in a rollover (and I don't intend to find out)

I have felt the effect between our two cars, but I think it's for another reason. I enjoy driving the older car because it is lighter, it responds, and I feel less shut off. The newer car is heavier, is sluggish (but far more powerful at speed), but feels enclosed. There is a disconnect between me inside the rolling box and the rest of the world. There is less highway noise, and the outside world feels "over there". It's easier to go fast without realising.

See this article by Jack Baruth on how badly the old Ford Panther platform vehicles such as the Mercury Grand Marquis and Lincoln Town Car perform in crashes. Those things are death traps in side impact crashes compared to more modern designs. Even the best driver can't avoid every collision.

https://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2014/02/falling-out-of-pan...

I drive a 2004 Ford Expedition with 235k miles on it. My parents ended up giving it to me because after all my siblings went to college what was the point of a family vacation vehicle.

We’ve had it so long that even though I’m almost 30, it’s the vehicle I learned how to drive in. Its nicknames at the office are "Clifford the Big Red SUV" and "The Lunch Bus".

> I own a 2000 mercury grand marquis.

With the secret de Sade trim, I hope. /s

> and a 12 year old car is no problem for anyone but the people at the wall street journal in my opinion.

They're doing economic reporting -- they're pointing out that the median age is going up, which is bad for auto makers.

I don't think they're telling anyone that is a bad thing for individuals, just for the economy as a whole.

Is it bad for the economy? The labour and supply chain for repair work must add up to an awful lot of people. It’s also going to be paying locals the bulk of the money, where buying a new car is often going to be sending the money off shore.

"just [bad] for the economy as a whole"

This seems to assume thay buying wastefull shit you don't need is good for economy? That efficiency and individuals saving money is bad for economy?

No, it's great for the economy if asset prices go down and consumers get more bang for their buck.

We want fewer people producing things that last more.

It's not per se bad for the economy to use capital assets more productively. In fact, the baseline assumption is that it's _good_ for the economy.

The economy as a whole isn't being harmed. US new car sales held steady at about 17M per year through 2019 before dropping in 2020 due to the pandemic and supply shortages.

I agree almost 100% with this. The only thing I'd add is that as you head towards double digit ages, you really do have to pay attention to things like corrosion, fatigue and general accumulated wear and tear in anything that moves. Even if the vehicle has been well looked after, there can be serious safety implications from sudden metalwork failures and the like, including in parts that you wouldn't necessarily check and periodically replace as part of a routine maintenance schedule. It definitely pays to know a good local mechanic if you want to run an older vehicle.

> The only thing I'd add is that as you head towards double digit ages

I got too far into this before realising you were referring to cars, not people. It holds up well.

It did have me wondering how early you learned to drive.

Can you explain the a pillar part? Did it get safer or less safe? Less strong?

The pillars keep getting thicker so they can support the weight of the vehicle in a rollover, and also to provide space for the side curtain airbags. This creates bigger blind spots since you can’t have glass there anymore, so these other safety systems help to make up for the reduced visibility.

It's almost hilarious that the safety requirements for cars keep getting more stringent yet it's perfectly fine to sit on top of an engine and two wheels and drive down the road at any speed without any safety equipment at all.

It's almost like car drivers and motorcyclists have different consumer preferences for safety and that carries over to how they lobby their politicians on traffic laws.

Right. Sort of like the consumer preference for risk vs. cost for various safety equipment in cars could be expressed were it not for mandates for "minimal" amounts of safety equipment.

Maybe. Reasonable people will look at a motorcycle and know full well they will lose in a collision ... with anything.

Not as easy to make an informed choice about cars. The high incidence of rollovers for SUVs comes to mind. Apparently consumers had no idea that the Ford Bronco (as an example) was as deadly as it was.

I agree, it would be nice if we allowed for relaxed safety on cars as long as they were in their own category — sort of like dune buggies or something so consumers knew the trade-offs they were making.

There already is one in most places - you can register a "special" car which many vintage car enthusiasts have to do. If you're happy with the steering wheel going through your chest on collision, or drive a DIY dune buggy, that's the category you can use.

But it's funny you mentioned that - dune buggies with roll bars are great for rolling over and keeping you safe. On the other hand, most widely available sport convertibles are not.

It's a great example on how people aren't good at making decisions for themselves.

It might be that people want to drive motorcycles, and honestly what can you possibly do to make them anywhere near as safe as a 5-star safety rated car?

Although I wouldn't be opposed to motorcycles being outlawed - I can't even imagine an America where this happens.

So what else can you possibly do?

Out of curiosity, and full disclosure-- as a motorcycle owner:

Why would you be okay with them being outlawed? Just because it doesn't affect you?

The parent post said "I wouldn't be opposed to motorcycles being outlawed". They didn't advocate for outlawing motorcycles. I think "Just because it doesn't affect you" is a fine reason to have a "no objection" position.

I can see why you may feel offended, but I don't think the parent post deserves your anger.

I think we all have an obligation to stand up for the rights of other people, even when the violation of those rights doesn't affect us directly.

Stating a lack of opposition to the removal of those isn't just "not caring" is actively taking a stance that you believe those rights have no value. I think requesting justification for that stance is reasonable and not an expression of "anger".

"driving a dangerous contraption" may or may not be reasonable, but it is not really a right in the same way as freedom of speech and right to a fair trial

> The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

Driving is explicitly not a right, it's a privilege. The constitution is not an exhaustive list of rights, but there are still loads of things you don't have the right to do.

I don't think OP was angry. It seemed like a fair question.

I'll bite.

When I was 16, I REALLY wanted to own a motorcycle. I thought they were the coolest.

Luckily, I was pretty poor - so I wouldn't have money for any such thing until I moved from my small town to get a job in Boston. There, I made friends with someone whose father owned a business that put people back together after motorcycle accidents. In just a couple of minutes, he convinced me of how unsafe they actually are. Despite the fact that I think motorcycles are cool as shit - it's hard to argue they are "less safe" than cigarettes for 18 year-olds (or for anyone).

Also, now that I'm older, I definitely wouldn't mind if they were banned on residential streets. At least the ones that are noisy as hell.

So - it's a mix of:

1) It wouldn't be out of line for the Government.

2) It honestly seems in-line for the Government (even if I don't really agree it's what the Government should be doing).

3) It wouldn't affect me personally.

4) Personally, it would actually be a plus since I'm older now and I can't stand the noise.

So as I said - I'm not going to vote to ban motorcycles - and I can't imagine it ever happening - but if it did - you won't see me out in the streets protesting.

I ride. I still think they are cool. I think every human has their own risk management profile - mine allows me to ride. I am not going ice skating ever again though! But I don't expect everyone to feel as I do, clearly. :-)

However regarding your points in turn:

1 & 2. I don't think nannying is what the government should be doing. I agree that seems to be the modern character of government though, at least where I live.

3. Obviously would affect me. :-P

4. I can't stand the noise either. I haven't modified my bike exhaust.

Most affected I think though would be the "uberEats-alike" delivery services as they seem largely run on the back of scooters, although ebikes are becoming popular too, though no less risky really.

Aside: if you still think motorcycles are cool, review what aspect of your risk profile precludes them. Maybe ride offroad, where traffic is much less a thing. If tarmac speed is the cool factor, you could go to a track. Modern MotoGP riders do both so you'd be in good company!

Just don't try to emulate their speed capability! (By the time you are good enough to ignore this advice, you will know it...)

One case you could make is they greatly disproportionately increase everyone else's liability insurance. They are sort of like if it was a popular exhilarating pasttime to tie a rope around loose tree limbs on people's property and pull on them while standing understand them, and the homeowner was liable if the person was hurt.

I'm not sure how your take works. Either :

A. Motorcycles are hitting many things causing everyone's insurance to go up. But here at least, motorcycles and riders are insured differently to cars, as you'd expect with differing %chance vs damage outcomes. So not true.

B. The mysterious group "Everyone" is at fault hitting motorcycles too much, causing everyone's insurance to go up. Which seems... fair?

Your insurance price is a function of your risk of getting in an accident and the expected damage from any given accident. If your driving patterns are unchanged but many vehicles on the road have fewer safety features, the odds of a collision remain constant but the expected damage from a collision goes up. The more people who ride motorcycles, the greater the odds that any given collision will happen to be with someone on a motorcycle, and thus the greater the odds that said collision will result in severe injuries. If the odds of a collision resulting in severe injuries goes up, either the odds of collision need to go down or insurance rates need to go up.

Thank you for a concise and clear explanation.

Under those circumstances I can see how "other people riding a motorcycle" makes your premium go up.

I don't quite agree that the "odds of a collision remain constant" over time. Motorcycles take less space for one. But obviously, being subject to more damage has a selective effect.

However in any case even if the selective trend is applied to maximum, holding to the assumption of safe/damage for riding-vs-driving means that the premium will have some increase vs a "all car" world.

But I live in a world where other people affect me in so many ways that I see this as another similar effect. Damn miners stealing my gaming GPU cards...

Maybe because cars carry more passengers than a motorcycle and the passengers don't know the risk.

The fact that motorcycling is a choice that none of the "think of the children" pearl clutchers make means that it is fairly immune to their lobbying efforts.

> … and also to provide space for the side curtain airbags.

… which increases the weight the pillars need to support, which causes the pillars to get thicker, &c.

A different mirror design would also help, but those are forbidden in the US (fun trick – if the European version of the car has similar mirror mounting, order the glass from there)

"and no nanny-state A pillars mean you arent doing 80 in a 65 quite as often."

Hmmm.. that certainly doesn't apply to me, and I drive a '96.

Spoken like a true boomer. New cars are much better at preventing harm than older cars are. They are objectively better in almost every way. I literally cannot fathom that HN users haven't transparencied this comment yet...

That sounds almost as amazing as what I inherited once upon a time: an 1985 Oldsmobile Delta 88 Royale Brougham LS with dark silver fleck craptastic paint, chrome everything, limo tint, gutless 307 V8 LV2 motor with roller lifter, 4 mobster body-capacity trunk, predictable drifting characteristics, and seating for 5-6 Americans. It was once of the most comfortable cars ever, but the crushed merlot velour interior (as featured in a Traci Lords' film) created so much static, it's a wonder more gas station fires and localized lightning didn't occur.

Shade tree mechanic here,most my cars are 20 YO old. I just got a "new" car a 12 yo Twin turbo AWD BMW. I have to say the amount of "lifetime fluid" stickers on it is way to damn high. it needed all these lifetime fluids changed at 40k intervals but BMW made it that way so they wouldn't have to maintain all the fluids. NOW ME AND THE MAD SCIENTIST GOT TO PULL APART TORQUE CONVERTER BECAUSE IT WAS THE FIRST ONE EVER IN HISTORY TO INCLUDE A CLUTCH PACK.

>NOW ME AND THE MAD SCIENTIST GOT TO PULL APART TORQUE CONVERTER BECAUSE IT WAS THE FIRST ONE EVER IN HISTORY TO INCLUDE A CLUTCH PACK.

The 80s called and want their AOD and 700R4 back.

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