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Comment by wannacboatmovie | Hacker News Reader

> being from brands that no longer exist

This may surprise you, but some people are poor and drive very old cars, some of whose brands no longer exist. They can only afford to incrementally fix them.

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What he's saying is they may have calculated rates based on how many cars of that brand were sold rather than how many are still "in circulation".

Then the out of production brands would have infinity DUI, accidents, etc...

No, I think DP (1) didn't understand "rates" in the title then (2) critiqued methodology without opening the link

or, maybe, if you are the type of person who can only afford a car whose brand no longer exists, you are sufficiently risk averse that you are much less likely to get an accident. Makes sense to me. Also, it may be that a lot of these car brands only exists in a sort of suvivorship-biased place. For example, I drive a '94 Camry, in large part because I've never had a need to replace it, having never been in an accident.

There's something so interesting about post-hoc reasoning. Everything is always explainable. Once you have the facts, you can construct the rationale. Somehow, if the stats showed the inverse, I bet there'd be someone explaining how "people driving cheap cars don't care if they get a few bumps and scratches" and so on and so forth.

> This may surprise you …

That certain doesn’t seem in the HN spirit. Can you elaborate on what that has to do with brands being a proxy for hidden variables?

And all of those brands are GM or Ford platforms. You can basically find all of the parts, except for trim and body panels.

Saturn parts are notoriously difficult to source.

We're waiting on the resurrection of Dodge Darts, Ford XL and Ford Sunliners so ours can get some new road relatives.

The article ranked the brands by incidents per 1,000 drivers.

Which is why they went with "rates". Right there in the title

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