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Comment by kushie | Hacker News Reader

Newer cars are far safer. According to NHTSA, occupant fatality rate per 100k cars in 1997 was 17.81 and was 10.05 in 2017 https://www.nhtsa.gov/sites/nhtsa.gov/files/documents/newer-...

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My teen-aged son was just in a bad accident last week. A lady pulled out from a driveway right in front of him while we was going 45mph. There's no question in my mind she at least would have been dead if she were in an older car without modern side impact safety standards. She had to be cut out of the car, but it protected her pretty darn well. His car was entirely destroyed all the way up to the firewall, after which point there was basically no visible damage at all. Modern cars are definitely safer.

I had a similar crash about 5 years ago when someone in a pickup abruptly made a u-turn in front of me. Said they didn't see me lol. Based on how the crash felt, I was stunned when I saw how fucked up the front of my car was. Well, that and wondering how people survive freeway crashes when a ~40mph crash screwed my car up that much!

We were a bit bruised but everyone walked away. I consider us lucky the pickup driver hadn't modified their truck and it had the OEM ride height and bumpers. Lots of people like deleting their bumpers and lifting the truck. that would have been so bad.

This is the counterintuitive thing. It’s actually good that cars get so messed up in accidents now. It usually means that the energy was dissipated via the cars designed failure modes (like crumple zones) instead of just transferring all of it to you.

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