I thought Smart Cars were suppose to be safe.

[some_other_dave]

It's all about the trade-offs. The F150 is gonna lose in a collision against a Big Rig. The big rig is gonna lose to a main-battle tank.

This sort of safety question is like questions about performance: How much is enough? More passive safety is good, yes. More performance is good as well. But driving around at high RPM so you have the ability to put as much torque on the road as possible will kill your gas mileage. And nobody wants to drive real-world roads in a suspension that provides race-car grip, nor do they want to change tires every 200 miles.

Everything is a compromise. You have to be able to evaluate your options and select ones that you can live with.

...Since I drive a 100 HP car that weighs 2000 lbs, you can probably see where my own choices lie.

-soD

[Clev]

Originally Posted by some_other_dave

...Since I drive a 100 HP car that weighs 2000 lbs, you can probably see where my own choices lie.

I think about this quite a bit, since 1/4 of my commute is on an undivided winding mountain road, sometimes in the rain or snow. About couple of years ago, as I was rounding a corner, a pickup in the inside upbound lanes started to go wide and into my lane. In my Saturn, I was able to go wide and easily recover. In my old F250, or even in my current Ranger, it's very likely that I would have ended up going sideways or upside-down through the guardrail and plummeting 1,000 feet down the side of the mountain.

Most of the accidents I've seen on that road are of the SUV-or-truck-lost-control type. Many of them are single-vehicle (or were precipitated by another vehicle that only lost a little paint on the bumper.) In the few head-on collisions I've seen, most resulted in deaths in both vehicles, and one involved the death of the driver of the SUV only, as the small car protected its occupants, but the SUV flipped onto its roof, crushing the driver. In a head-on collision at any appreciable speed (which the zomg-I-need-a-tank crowd cites as their excuse for bigger and bigger trucks), neither vehicle typically fares well.

I wish the Clunker (my regular commuter) was a newer car with airbags, ABS and improved crumple structure, but I sure wouldn't trade it for a top-heavy tail-light truck.

[Christ]

Originally Posted by rainyday

Unfortunately accidents do happen, people do get injured and die.... whether it is your fault or not. It's going to happen. In a perfect world everybody would follow the traffic laws and there would be no accidents, but it's not. You have to play with what you've got.

Have you actually sat down and had a look at traffic laws ANYWHERE? Most times, a knowledge and understanding of traffic laws, as well as following them to the letter, would net you nothing short of an accident.

Traffic laws don't account for situational responsibility, they attempt to control it. If everyone used a little common sense, and some basic courtesy, we'd all have less of a chance of accidents. By the nature of the term accident, they'd still happen... accidentally.

[rainyday]

Originally Posted by Christ

Have you actually sat down and had a look at traffic laws ANYWHERE? Most times, a knowledge and understanding of traffic laws, as well as following them to the letter, would net you nothing short of an accident.

Traffic laws don't account for situational responsibility, they attempt to control it. If everyone used a little common sense, and some basic courtesy, we'd all have less of a chance of accidents. By the nature of the term accident, they'd still happen... accidentally.

By traffic laws, I'm inferring both traffic laws and traffic awareness. Basic common sense.

And pretty much all accidents, 99.9999% of accidents happen accidentally in today's world too. I've never met anybody who said, let's see what it's like to rear end this car at the light. But it happens.

And hoping for people to use common sense across the board is a battle that was lost long ago.