People pay more for units all the time for various reasons - location, orientation, superstition, etc. I’m sure they’ll add “not suffocating to death during a fire” to the list.
We would have many new cars for 4-digit prices if not for the large number of safety systems required on cars.
And buildings in North America are often framed out of the same material that they burn in their fireplaces.
Both present inherent dangers. Both have widespread safety regulations for this reason.
Vehicle accidents are the 2nd leading cause of accidental death in the US and fires are 6th. And this is the result of many decades of both being highly regulated.
People still die in scary numbers there no matter the regulations.
Cars can't be made safer anymore. 60Mphs frontal collisions have single digit percentage survivability chance because physics.
Homes can be made much safer by building them differently.
Cars can absolutely be made safer. They certainly haven’t stopped getting safer yet.
2. 60mph is a speed not a force imparted on a vehicle. The way with which a vehicle’s momentum at 60mph is dissipated makes a critical difference to the crash energy imparted on the occupants. Road design has greatly improved this in recent decades.
3. Active crash prevention/mitigation systems can prevent 60mph accidents from happening or improve their outcomes.
Yes, but that doesn't count as surviving the crash
> 60mph is a speed not a force imparted on a vehicle.
The force imparted on you in a 60mph crash by the seatbelt will be lethal no matter how much deceleration space you have. You got at 27 meters per second, and you only have at a maximum 1 meter to decelerate. And if you crash into a heavier, faster vehicle, it's even worse.
It counts as making cars safer which was the above claim I am supporting.
> you only have at a maximum 1 meter to decelerate. And if you crash into a heavier, faster vehicle, it's even worse.
Most vehicle crashes are not head-on incidents.
Improvements in road design have affected the proportion of crashes that are head-on. Recent improvements in active safety features may decrease this further: eg. lane departure mitigation.
In many real-world accidents, vehicles have dozens or hundreds of meters to decelerate.
A lot of those people live in seismically active areas. While modern masonry construction is certainly safer than traditional masonry, in general wood is far less dangerous than stone or brick in an earthquake.
Note: not apartments. Houses.
Steel and concrete are ugly and cold. Wood is warm. Even brick and stone are more humane.
It's not the speed that kills you, it's the impact. Multifloor buildings are designed to help you live and work at a height that can kill you, and to prevent air entering and escaping which can kill you.
If you can assume that the risk of fire or collapse isn't worth mitigating against, why not assume that a car will never hit anything?