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Originally Posted by SuperTrooper
Almost the same number of people died on America's highways EVERY YEAR during the Vietnam era.
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I guess I could have written that more clearly: I meant deaths among the people my age or older that I knew while I was growing up (in a town small enough that everyone knew everyone else), more died in Vietnam (and also by suicide) than in auto accidents.
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As far as the safety of larger vehicles, the stats don't lie. Physics doesn't lie. Based on IIHS stats (Number of deaths per million vehicles registered) you ar twice as likely to die in a small car than a large car, truck, or SUV.
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Maybe so. I won't get into debating the accuracy of those statistics, or the misuse of physics. But the fact that you can be killed in an auto accident, or even that it's more likely in a smaller car, doesn't make ANY car a "death trap". The plain fact is that 10 times as many people die from smoking, almost as many from couch-potatoitis. Auto accidents cause only a small fraction of deaths. See here:
DCCPS: OD: Actual Causes of Death
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Vehicles don't go off the road all by themselves...
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Nor do they ordinarily hit other vehicles, or stationary objects, all by themselves.
There's a real irony here, for those who'll allow themselves to see it. You have the auto safety nuts intent on making people safer by making vehicles ever larger & heavier, which means that they use more oid, which in turn greatly decreases overall safety because of the economic, geopolitical, and environmental effects of oil addiction. Does having to choose between filling the gas tank and say a medical checkup make us safer? Does enriching the jihadists with an ever-increasing flood of petro-dollars make us safer? How about changing, possibly even destroying, the planetary ecosystem?