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Comment by SilverElfin | Hacker News Reader

I don’t know about this. Lots of luxury safety features are standard in budget cars today. Even if not standard, the dealers mostly stock vehicles with safety packages. Hyundais I see come with lane keeping and radar cruise and surround cameras and blind spot monitors and automatic braking and other stuff. These have made driving MUCH safer. For drivers and others.

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The point is, those features were available to people buying S classes 15 years ago. So not only were rich people safer for those 15 years, there's still a huge subset of people that even today drive old cheaper cars instead of buying the Hyundai that has it today. There's probably a 30 year safety difference between rich and poor.

So what? Seems like a good thing safety is improving.

Idk so what. We can go from there once we at least are talking about the same thing correctly, so I tried to correct the misconception by OP.

One random idea... Instead of giving well off people $7500 to buy huge luxury electric cars that are safe, we give poor people trading in old unsafe cars (that they've owned for over 12 months) $7500 to buy a car with side airbags so they don't die as easily in accidents.

Well the government does both. Also, the 7500 is so the rich people buy electric instead of gas.

Also, 7500 seems too much for the risk reduction. How much is that per life, tens of millions? More?Seems terribly inefficient.

You can save a life for $150 and most people don't want to. The government is actively moving in the opposite direction, defunding that as a waste of money.

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