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God, this is pretty much my mother. She couldn’t care any less about “ruggedness” or that “tough guy” image. Her only argument ever is “safety.” I am not in i
by filoleg 3y ago
God, this is pretty much my mother.
She couldn’t care any less about “ruggedness” or that “tough guy” image. Her only argument ever is “safety.”
I am not in it to change her mind. But whenever she brings this topic up and I show her the actual safety ratings for different vehicles, it’s almost as if her brain shuts down. She would say something along the lines “uh oh idk, maybe, who knows, it doesn’t feel as safe,” and the whole thing gets forgotten. Right until she decides to bring it up again from scratch at some point later, as if our previous conversations about it never happened.
Lowkey, I think it would be an interesting idea to mandate displaying brightly colored safety ratings for every car on display at a dealership. No need to overcomplicate it by showing the entire stat sheet with a bajillion different numbers. Just one giant number for the overall rating, and about 4-5 subcategory numbers (e.g., driver safety score, passenger safety score, etc.). I think 1-2 of those metrics should be “the safety sub-category on which our car scored the worst.”
My only worry about this is that the metrics themselves become the target goal, leading to either car manufacturers influencing safety rating boards or them maliciously complying by gaming the metrics just for those measured categories at the expense of everything else. Though the latter isn’t as much of a concern, given that it is pretty difficult to accomplish, and it would still have a large negative effect on the overall score.
- matsemann 3y agoEvery year, loads of kids die because a family member runs over them by accident in the driveway, a parking lot etc. With these huge cars, you don't properly see around them, and 360 cameras and sensors will not make up for all of that. So yeah, "safety".
- filoleg 3y agoA lot of those car manufacturers just don’t care, and it isn’t exclusive to large cars either (though the damage they can do is obviously much higher, making them more dangerous to pedestrians). I like sports cars, so I tried test driving a Camaro about 5 years ago. You would think that visibility on a rather small and fast 2-seater would be at least better than on an average SUV. It was singularly the worst car I’ve ever driven in terms of visibility, compared to even most SUVs. Not even joking, it feels like driving a military tank, but just faster and smaller, with the field of view being extremely reminiscent of seeing the road through a thin horizontal slit. It’s not like it got worse over time either, because I remember the 2013 version was at least just as awful. Way to ruin a fine car with that tank-slit visibility. This specific case didn’t even have anything inherently to do with the type or size of the car (unlike with some giant trucks), so it made me extremely mad. It was quite literally for nothing.
- shiroiuma 3y agoI got to ride as passenger in someone's new Camaro at about that time, and I fully agree: the visibility was absolutely horrendous. I couldn't believe it. How is such a vehicle legal to drive? Does the US not have any kind of auto regulations governing visibility at all?
- alan-hn 3y ago>Does the US not have any kind of auto regulations governing visibility at all? Apparently not, considering the topic of TFA
- filoleg 3y agoThey do. Just because those regulations might not be good enough, that doesn’t mean that they don’t have any at all. For a specific example, I am pretty sure that backup cameras have been mandatory on all new cars since at least 2018.
- shiroiuma 3y agoRight, so the US now has some regulation to make sure people can see behind them. However, there seems to be basically no regulation to make sure they can see in front of the vehicle.
- filoleg 3y agoTo be fair, that same Chevy Camaro I am complaining about above was sold in EU and UK as well, so I wouldn’t throw stones at the US regulation being behind in this case. It only stopped being sold in 2019 in EU+UK, only the SS version, and not due to the front visibility. Sadly, seems like Chevy announced last year the end of production of Camaros in 2024 in general.
- shiroiuma 3y agoGood point. It looks like all the regulators need to create some new regulations requiring decent forward-looking visibility, which means no more humongous hoodlines.
- sokoloff 3y ago> whenever she brings this topic up and I show her the actual safety ratings for different vehicles, it’s almost as if her brain shuts down The NHTSA safety ratings come with the following notation: "Note: A vehicle’s rating, or Overall Vehicle Score, can be compared with other vehicles of similar size and weight" She may be, whether knowingly or not, interpreting the data offered more in-line with the guidance provided with the data.
- filoleg 3y agoWhich was kind of my point. I would love if there was some sort of a safety rating that was cross-comparable across all vehicles, not just within the same category/type. I wouldn’t want it to be replacing the per-category one, as that one is way more precise and accurate. But there should be a way to roughly compare the safety of two different cars of different classes. Given the NHTSA rating notation you posted mentioning normalization by size and weight, I wonder if there is a rough function of weight and size that would allow for “denormalizing” scores into raw approximates.