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Old 06-22-2009, 07:47 PM   #46 (permalink)
some_other_dave
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Quote:
Originally Posted by 99LeCouch View Post
Same thing on the roads. Give people a "safer", more tank-like automobile. They'll still figure out some way of killing themselves in it. It's just going to take dumber driving.
I wish I could remember where I read this, but evidently if you check over the statistics our "safer cars" don't actually seem to have changed the fatality rates (per mile traveled). Not once you factor speeds and a few other things out of it. The theory espoused in the (article? book?) I was reading was that this was due to people driving to a "level of perceived risk".

So today's cars, with crumple zones and power disk ABS brakes and airbags and so on simply make people "push harder", leave less room to react, and so on. Which fits with my own (very unscientific!) observations pretty well.

-soD
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