As car safety features improve, so do the number of car crashes?!

[thewayne]

My Matrix has to be the most safety-feature equipped car that I've ever owned. I don't drive any faster in it than before, I'm driving at the same speeds that I've driven at for probably 20 years (I don't like paying speeding tickets, they cost lots of money. then again, if you don't pay speeding tickets....). But I can definitely see the point of the study. Unfortunately they don't cite real-world data, if they expanded their study to pull up accident records from major cities and states and analyzed model years (i.e. car age vs year being studied) I think that would be more significant.

Maybe I'll do that as a study if I ever have to do a statistics paper.

http://blog.wired.com/cars/2007/05/as_car_safety_i.html

Comments

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

Actually it did mention reduced injuries: "Accidents increased while injuries to drivers decreased, thanks to..."

The first car of my parent's that I remember was a '69 Impala, I was eight. It had seat belts, I don't think the front seats had shoulder belts. Their next car, a '73 Impala (later my first car) had front seat shoulder belts, but you had to manually link them into the seat belt metal tongue.

I would imagine their previous car, whatever it was, didn't have seat belts in the back.


And yeah, getting impaled on a steering wheel would definitely suck!