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Comment by huehehue | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

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.

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.

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.)

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...

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