Would you be willing to pay millions for your car to make it safer? The pope has bullet proof glass, different body materials can protect your life. How would you define excessive?
R&D is already baked into the final price of everything we buy so that has no argument.
And the bullet proof glass thing I shouldn't even respond to because of the ridiculous extreme you've had to go to, trying to argue against me saying the companies should play it safe, but I'll reply this one time. I'm not asking the car company to protect me from an assassin's bullets. That is not something they control. I'm asking them to "play it safe" when developing components for the car so the car doesn't kill me while I'm in the car. They are responsible for their domain and are not producing armored vehicles for war time. So ridiculous lol
Your comment was nothing is too excessive. The truth is, everything has a level where we try to balance cost/safety. Having Mazda spend millions more puts the base stickier price up. It might be $100, $500, $5000, $50,000 $5,000,000. How much more are you willing to pay and if you really cared wouldn't you buy a Volvo over a Mazda?
This really isn’t helping. Cars are very safe at the moment, with the driver being the key factor in accidents. They are very safe at the current price point. GP was arguing we should keep fighting to keep them safe. That means we keep doing whatever it is we’re doing, which is making cars safe, at a reasonable cost.
People roll their cars on the highway and walk away these days. That wasn't a thing that happened in the 60s, 70s, 80s, and even 90s. Some people don't survive, but a vast majority do. You're instantly surrounded by airbags from all sides these days and have a sort of forcefield to absorb the energy of the crash so you don't have to. The same concept has safely dropped rovers onto other planets. Engines nosedive downward into the ground instead of back into the firewall and then into your legs, crumple zones take the impact and absorb the energy instead of transferring it through the solid steel bumper, solid steel frame, solid steal dashboard, solid steal steering column, and solid steel steering where, where your skull is next in line to absorb that energy which up to that point has hardly dissipated. In the 60s a fender bender often messed up people's necks for life, yet people today can often flip their car and walk away with scratches, never to complain about any life long issues stemming from the accident. Automatic collision detechion systems can notice a stopped object and apply the brakes faster than our meat cpus can even process the eyeball input and notice what is going on, and then dealing with the latency of brain to muscle signals and muscle speed and accuracy. When you're about to hit a brick wall at highway speeds, 250ms more of brakes on full can shed an insane amount of speed/momentum/energy. And let's not forget about all the people who text and drive who would rear end or cross the lane and hit someone head on if it wasn't for collision detection stopping them or lane keep yanking the car back into the lane it should be in. Cars are safer than they have ever been.
I’m guessing it’s arguable, but in the top 25 causes of accidents (in the US), I only found 2 that are linked to the car itself. Cars themselves seem fairly safe.
Indeed, in a car accident, the car itself is rarely to blame.
But that was not my point.
At the end of the day, no matter how well it's built, a car is a several tons lump of steel launched at significant speed. It's an inherently deadly machine.
Having a lapse of attention while driving a car? you might easily cause a someone to die.
Having the same lapse on a bike? you might cause some broken bones.
Having the same lapse while walking? you are good for some "Oh... I'm sorry".
If you live in the US, getting shot while driving (or at school, or at work) at is something that happens from time to time, so if you value safety, you really do need armor and bullet-resistant glass on your car to drive in America.
Are you denying that there's more guns than people in the US, or that tens of thousands of people are killed by guns there every year? Strange how Americans are so in denial of the war-like state of their country and daily life in it.
Where did I deny anything? I called the comment edgy. I was stating my opinion regarding the edginess of the parent comment. My opinion, on the comment I replied to, was that it was edgy. That was my conclusion, regarding my opinion, on the topic of the parent comment.
Strange how HNs assume what country others reside in and apply their opinions, projecting them even, onto anything possible, whether or not the thing they are applying them to is at all related to what they reply with, and how they like to put words into the mouths of others with absolutely zero context to be able to make such assumptions, and are in denial about the ignorant-like state of their psyche and daily life as an idiot.
Never said "X at all costs" but thanks for trying to speak for me. Going forward, please note that my preference is to speak for myself, as should you.
I'm not sure why you took such offense; it's a reasonable interpretation of the words you spoke for yourself:
> there is no such thing as excessive "playing it safe"
As you noted in your other comment:
> I'm asking them to "play it safe" when developing components for the car so the car doesn't kill me while I'm in the car.
As in the old adage in computing ("the only unhackable computer is one that isn't connected to anything"), there's no way to ensure that the components of a car don't fail, even while in routine use. There is only more or less likely that they won't fail, and of course, less and less likely to fail is more and more expensive.
We might say that the only uncrashable car is one that sits in the garage and never goes anywhere. Obviously, that would be playing it safe excessively, since it would defeat the purpose of having a car to begin with. But what about less obvious cases? Toyota recalled millions of cars for their "unintended acceleration" issue. The merits of that particular case aside, how much more would someone pay for a Corolla that would be progressively less likely to have safety issues? At some point before infinity, it would be considered excessive.
I think the sliding scale of how safe is playing it too safe is a discussion very much worth having.
Yes, I just don't want to pay all of it myself. I just want to pay the marginal cost of making it. Let the automaker invest said millions (really billions over all the individual components) into the design and manufacture.
