Hacker News Reader

Comment by Roark66 | Hacker News Reader

I tend to drive almost exclusively older cars. Once I had an accident in a 15 year old golf (this was around 2015 so the golf was made in around year 2000). This was basically emergency breaking on wet road at motorway speeds(about 130kph or 80mph)followed by loss of traction, then some sideways sliding finished with head on smashing into a side barrier with enough force that the car ended in the middle of the road (it must have bounced, but I have to admit I can't remember the exact moment, I estimate it was probably still going at last 45kph 30mph when it hit). I was perfectly fine except loosing few seconds of time. I managed to jump out of the car and have enough presence of mind to drag it off to the side of the road before incoming traffic crashed into it(thankfully wheels were fine enough for this). The car was totaled, and I didn't even have a scratch. That's an example of now 20 year + car safety...

View on HN

A single anecdote is not data. I can fall by slipping on ice dressed in shorts and a tshirt, and walk away fine. But i can also do the same, but dressed in a way more padded and protective winter coat, pants, boots, then fall and twist my ankle. That doesn't say much about relative safety of shorts+tshirt and protective winter gear when it comes to falling on ice.

Back to the topic at hand, are you claiming that all of the safety improvements added to the cars over the past 20 years didn't make a massive positive impact on passenger safety during collisions? Arent't there agencies worldwide that issue safety ratings after performing variety of tests and studies (that are way more rigorous and quantitative than a one-off anecdote), and they show massive safety improvements over time for all cars in general? Or are you trying to claim that those agencies can't be trusted, and that their tests are not valid?

I am not trying to be combative about it. I am just genuinely trying to figure out what point you were trying to make with this anecdote, but all I have right now is pure guesses.

Not the op, but I'll note all of those tests are about what physically happens once you're in crash or specific situation. Many or most don't gauge how or why you got into that situation, or how likely you are to do so in that vehicle. I don't know how "firmware update made care less safe" or "adaptive cruise control disengaged unexpectedly" or (my personal concern) "car UI negatively impacted drivers situational awareness and reaction time" etc would show up in e.g. IIHS rating?

A good 10-20 year old car may have as good crash rating as many modern cars. top or average modern cars may be better than top or average 10 year old cars. Stats are interesting thing. But then there's the average driver assistance vs average UI vs average visibility vs average handling of these cars.

Bottom line, I don't feel less safe but I do feel differently safe, in my old Subaru and new Honda.

> I don't know how "firmware update made care less safe" or "adaptive cruise control disengaged unexpectedly" or (my personal concern) "car UI negatively impacted drivers situational awareness and reaction time" etc would show up in e.g. IIHS rating?

What percentage of crashes can be attributed to that? Let's make it simpler, how many crashes per year as a raw number happen due to those reasons you listed?

Because out of all things I would be worried about when it comes to car safety, this is the one that is least concerning to me. Especially since for most modern cars that have such a thing as "software updates" in the first place, they have the driving subsystem and infotainment subsystem entirely detached (yes, even on Teslas). Very easy to confirm yourself by force rebooting the infotainment center and seeing that the car still drives just fine.

This is false, even more so for most Tesla models. Cars have a distributed E/E architecture where embedded software runs on several computers (called ECUs that range from anywhere between 10 and 100+). Most newer Tesla models are ahead of the curve and have a more centralized (zonal) E/E architecture with very few number of ECUs.

In summary, the infotainment system and the drivetrain definitely speak to each other and unless a secure architecture comes along, I would not discount the possibility of unintended interactions due to bugs. In fact, most famous car hacks start from the infotainment system and make their way into the drivetrain.

1. I am not a car engineer,or anywhere near it, but everything I've ever read about modern cars indicates their infotainment system and engine control unit are at very least on same bus and can and do communicate.

2. I don't have those numbers, in fact point of my post I'd that I don't know how we get those numbers. When I'm a passenger I'm terrified how distracted people can be by poor UI. I wish we had more hard data. Some studies are slowly emerging.

I'm all for forbidding touch screens for driver interaction in vehicles and I'm honestly surprised that this hasn't happened yet. Anything that takes your eyes of the road is a risk. Where I live we're pretty hard on smartphones in the car while driving (and rightly so) and yet we accept touch screens with menus four levels deep for basic stuff.

The point I was trying to make is that from crash safety point of view an upper tier car(for example a well equipped golf) made 20 years ago might be a lot safer than a cheapest modern car(at least here in EU where safety standards in 2000 were pretty good already, I have no idea about other countries). Yes, this is just a single anecdote, but I seriously doubt I would be here to tell it if I was driving let's say a 2014 Fiat Punto or similar.

Why do I compare an old "upper class car" with a modern "lowest tier"? Isn't this unfair? No, because that is usually the choice people have. If they can afford just the cheapest of new cars, there is likely a much better one that is not new available for the same price or a lot cheaper.

This is pretty much on the money. Car safety with respect to the occupants is increasing over time, but it has always also increased over the budget with the time pegged to a certain point. So your 1997 high end car may well be safer than your 2015 budget car.

Case in point: I've restored a Daihatsu Trevis, a small Japanese budget car, and after working on it and bringing it back up to the standard required to pass a salvage title inspection (which is a higher standard than the original one where I live, you have to book an inspection for the vehicle that takes several hours and that will have cross frame measurements and all kinds of assessments to make sure that the vehicle is safe) I decided that this is not a car that is suitable for many kilometers of highway driving. A crash in that car that would be survivable in even the cheapest Golf or Skoda would be lethal in that little car. So I ended up passing it on to people that only drive in the city and got an elderly Golf instead.

And a Golf was definitely not the high end of safety at that time, but it was tons better than the much more modern Trevis.

This somewhat reminds me of my first car. An Eastern German VW Trabant with a two stroke 600cc engine. It was a car I did drive on motorways occasionally as it was my only car (I bought it for $100 when I was 18,the car was 18 years old too at the time).

That car was often a butt of many jokes as people thought its chassis was made off "recycled paper" (in fact it was one of the first composite chassis cars). It was called a plastic-soap-box, but it was so simple to repair one needed a push bike set of tools to fix anything (until once a suspension strut in a rear wheel failed). Then all it took to be able to get back home slowly was to wrap it with some steel wire... Fun little car. Unfortunately it was scrapped against my will when I was abroad (my parents weren't happy I drove it). Today many people consider it a classic and it has quite a following.

Doing 80 mph in the rain and having a road barrier save your life is great, but I don't think I said "A 25 year old car is a death sentence"

It's just pretty well established that in the last 25 years we've made huge strides is vehicle safety.

People routinely walk away from accidents where they would die in a 25 year old car because of those advancements.

The difference in survivability is not small: https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...

I wouldn't say a road barrier had any positive effect on the situation. What probably saved the situation is that a 20 year old golf handles way better in a slip than the cheapest of current cars (at least back then in 2015) which was the usual choice when I rented at the time. Would I be doing 80mph in a Fiat Punto in the first place?Probably not. Would 60 mph be enough to loose traction in it? Who knows.

If you extend the time range to 25 years I might agree, but let's say we start at year 2000. I fail to see those "huge strides in vehicle safety". Perhaps what you mean is that certain "upper tier" features made their way into basic equipment. That no doubt has positive impact on an average driver.

However, at least for me, any time I bought/rented an old car it was always a top spec version, so as mentioned. I don't see those huge strides.

The last 25 years have seen some improvements, but nothing nearly as dramatic as the change between the 25 years prior to that. Seatbelts, airbags, crash testing and designing a car for survivability in case of an accident are all things that happened between 1970 and 1990, since then we've seen incremental improvements but for the most part things have not changed all that much. That's also why automobile manufacturers have trouble introducing new models because the older ones are really pretty good. The car I'm driving has gone through 2 upgrades since 1997 (the year it was built) and neither of those is a huge improvement safety wise over the one that I've got. The biggest question mark is probably the longevity of the pyrotechnics and the airbag materials, but for both I've been reassured multiple times by the dealership that they are fine (not something you want to test), and that this goes for any airbags manufactured after 1993 except for one particular notorious bad batch made by Takata, and those fortunately are not in my car.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com