Well safety system are required and do add a fair bit of weight/complexity and a wide range of interconnected systems. For top safety ratings you need a heavy

Well safety system are required and do add a fair bit of weight/complexity and a wide range of interconnected systems. For top safety ratings you need a heavy body, reinforced in weird ways, so that even an offset collision results in quite the dance of sacrificial bending, redirecting, and even rotating the engine under the car so it doesn't penetrate the cabin. It also requires quite a few sensors, each of which are on a wiring harness that reaches all over the car including accelerators in the front bumper, explosives in the airbags, explosives in the seat belt retractor, wheel torque, acceleration, and speed sensors. The wiring harness has secondary effects as well, as a critical system it must be protected, numerous mounts, and changes to design for it's routing, protection, and of course access for a human or robot to install the harness. I noticed that in Teslas the a pillars are HUGE compared to what I'm used to in a subaru forester. Numerous suspension pieces are designed to fail in a safe way so a collision doesn't redirect the wheels or engine into the cabin. I do wonder if it's worth it, if all vehicles weighed 25% less, would there be more or less deaths? At least for bikes and pedestrians larger/heavier vehicles have cost lives.