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Also, driver safety wasn’t a thing, either. If a car came to a rapid stop, those kids would have been flying through the front window, but chances are the driver would be impaled on the steering column (the steering wheel would easily break of, but that column would be rigidly connected to the front axle), the engine block might be pushed through the car into the back seats, maiming any legs it encountered, etc.

Cars were extremely dangerous at the time and could kill their passengers in collisions even at low speeds.

Ralph Nader had a point (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsafe_at_Any_Speed:_The_Desig...)

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This story is dumb luck, and not an anti-seatbelt sentiment in any way: my grandmother was in a collision severe enough to send her flying through the front windshield and into the ditch, and the shape of the car(s) afterwards suggested that if she weren't tossed from the car she would have been crushed to pieces.

Things are different today, but interesting to think that the structural integrity on these old machines was so poor that you'd rather get hurled from the car in an accident.

That was an argument people made when seatbelts first became mandatory. They thought that without a seatbelt they would be "thrown clear" in an accident, when in reality that is very unlikely to happen.

My elderly medical University lecturer told us about first aid in old cars and how before seatbelts and safety glass, people would have their necks slit from the windshield while being ejected leading to a rather quick demise.

Never mind that being "thrown clear" involves breaking the windshield with your skull. Not pleasant under the best of conditions.

Yeah, it's crazy to think there was a time when cars put little to no engineering into passenger safety. A modern car is designed with room for the engine bay to be crushed to absorb some of the impact while all of the rigidity is put into the cage surrounding the passenger compartment

At least that's the case for normal cars. SUVs have some weird regulatory loopholes around them (in the US) that negate these good ideas.

Decent manufacturers still use best safety practices even when not required to. Volvo and Mercedes invented most of the modern safety tech in the 70s and 80s and use it on all models, most other higher end cars do as well nowadays.

If your car company only makes your car as safe as legally required, is that what you want to trust your family with?

What you are saying is certainly true.

However, the problem is that in order to get your SUV classified as a 'light truck' in the US, and benefit from regulatory loopholes, certain features are pretty much banned. Some of them impact the safety, especially of pedestrians.

Btw, I'm not so much worried about the safety of my own car (especially since I don't own one), but rather the safety of other people's cars for cyclist, pedestrians and other cars.

(I don't live in the US either, I just bring up their regulatory environment as an example.)

Sure, but try to import a euro-spec Volvo or Mercedes into USA or Canada and the safety authorities will treat you like you’re pointing a gun at them.

The body of the car is identical. It would make no commercial sense to build the same vehicle with a rigid passenger cell surrounded by crumple zones for some markets, and in some other fashion for others. Any spec differences are equipment, peripherals, and engines – so performance, fuel economy, and exhaust cleanliness may differ, but not passive safety.

ETA: Also, many of those Euro-standard “European” cars are built in the USA and exported to their “home“ markets.

Sure, the legal requirements are more than sufficient

That’s a personal decision of course, but the most dangerous cars have real world death rates over 200x that of the safest designs, and they are all legal[1]. Driving is incredibly dangerous on average, yet the risk can be almost entirely mitigated by choosing the right vehicle. I find it shocking how much difference there is.

[1] https://www.kbb.com/car-news/the-deadliest-and-least-deadly-...

That's an understatement. According to that data, the most dangerous cars are infinitely more dangerous than the safest cars (205 driver deaths per million registered vehicle years vs. 0). Even more interestingly, the fifth safest car is infinitely more dangerous than the safest four cars (2 vs 0).

Also note that this is the driver death rate. The death rates for other people are vastly different.

You shouldn't jump to conclusions from the data, either. A Dodge Challenger (3rd most driver deaths) is probably not unsafe per se, it just attracts people that want to take unnecessary risks.

Driving is quite safe on average. In my home country there's 5.1 deaths per a billion vehicle kilometers. That's about one death every 2.5 million hours of driving at highway speed. Many other things carry a greater risk of death.

Traffic accidents are still the leading cause of death in older children and young adults... as a parent, it is by far the most important safety factor I have any control over.

That is a good point about confounding factors based on who buys these cars, but overall it is pretty clear that most of the safest vehicles are larger cars and mid-sized SUVs from the higher end Japanese and European companies. They are all vehicles that are both heavy and have car like safety features.

There are some SUVs such as the Nissan Pathfinder and BMW X3 with a driver death rate of zero.

https://www.iihs.org/ratings/driver-death-rates-by-make-and-...

The Space Shuttle has a death rate of 14 per 542,398,878 miles.

Death rate may not be the only variable to look at.

Interestingly, that matches the rate per vehicle miles for late-1970s automobiles: https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/historical-fatalit...

(originally linked from elsewhere in this discussion)

It's why motorbikes don't have a seatbelt. Except the ones with a roof, which do.

It's entirely possible that when a vehicle doesn't have a roof, it's better to be thrown out (while wearing a helmet and other safety gear, obviously) than to be strapped in a seatbelt.

And yet we have so many people who want them to go back to making cars like that...

> If a car came to a rapid stop, those kids would have been flying through the front window

That's how my sister broke her arm and what got my entire family on the "buckle up every time" train.

Fortunately, she was in the backseat of a van so she wasn't ejected from the vehicle. But it was a real wake up call. (This happened back in the 90s).

The glass broke like picture frame glass, all sharp-edged and spiky. Safety glass was invented as it breaks into tiny shards that are unlikely to cause major damage.

I read Roald Dahl's autobiography when I was young (young enough to be reading his other children's books) and remember his description of the car accident in 1925, when he was 9:

> The driver was to be that twelve-years-older-than-me half-sister ... She had received two full half-hour lessons in driving from the man who delivered the car, and in that enlightened year of 1925 this was considered quite sufficient.

> ...

> Spurred on by our shouts and taunts, the ancient sister began to increase the speed. The engine roared and the body vibrated. The driver was clutching the steering-wheel as though it were the hair of a drowning man, and we all watched the speedometer needle creeping up to twenty, then twenty-five, then thirty. We were probably doing about thirty-five miles an hour when we came suddenly to a sharpish bend in the road. The ancient sister, never having been faced with a situation like this before, shouted ‘Help!’ and slammed on the brakes and swung the wheel wildly round. The rear wheels locked and went into a fierce sideways skid, and then, with a marvellous crunch of mudguards and metal, we went crashing into the hedge. The front passengers all shot through the front windscreen and the back passengers all shot through the back windscreen. Glass (there was no Triplex then) flew in all directions and so did we. My brother and one sister landed on the bonnet of the car, someone else was catapulted out on to the road and at least one small sister landed in the middle of the hawthorn hedge. But miraculously nobody was hurt very much except me. My nose had been cut almost clean off my face as I went through the rear windscreen and now it was hanging on only by a single small thread of skin. My mother disentangled herself from the scrimmage and grabbed a handkerchief from her purse. She clapped the dangling nose back into place fast and held it there.

— Roald Dahl, Boy (1984)

One strand away from becoming Voaldahlmort

If a car came to a rapid stop, those kids would have been flying through the front window

Nah, Mom would stick her arm out during rapid stops to keep that from happening. No, Mom had never taken a physics class, thanks for asking.

Also, when your 70 something granddad says cars today are fragile and break too easily in a crash, they're right.

Old cars were built to last, to survive crashes with a minimum of damage and to be easily repairable as soon as you hose out the remains of the former occupants who were turned into an untasty raspberry jam like substance after bouncing around the inside of their indestructible death cabs at 60 miles an hour.

If it weren't for rust and lack of maintenance, many of those old beasts would still be on the road today.

Today's cars collapse and crumple like wet tissue by comparison, but then after the accident your friendly local fireman can use some powered jaws to open your little nesting cocoon and extract you largely unhurt from accidents that would have turned you into aforementioned jam just 60 years ago.

Sure, the car is toast but who wouldn't trade a brand new car for years of life, especially when many people have insurance so your deductible can be as little as a few hundred dollars?

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