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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   24615 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 8, 2024

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Pareto. 80% of the improvement in auto safety over the last 40 years comes from seatbelts, first-gen airbags, and crumple zones. The first two were cheap, but the third one was not (if you crash/are crashed into- it's not really more expensive to make a car that accordions if you hit something, but a modern car is more likely to be a total loss from that event).

There isn't much of a difference between survivability of a crash in 2010 (average car on the road has airbags) and 2024 (average car on the road has... more airbags), but the cost of a car has doubled and pedestrians now get killed more often because visibility is the cost of that safety.

Safetyists are demonstrably utility monsters. It's like the car seat thing: massive improvements for a very small cost is fine, marginal improvements for a very large cost are not, and people who are incapable of differentiating between the two because they're stuck on the baseline risk treadmill (exactly like the hedonic treadmill, but for neurotics) will feed literally every scrap of productivity to the machine if they're not slapped down by the people who actually have to pay for it.

  1. My understanding is pedestrian deaths are driven at least partially by trucks becoming bigger for gas consumption standards.

  2. I drive a Tesla. The safety on it is pretty amazing and helped my wife avoid an accident already.

I don't even disagree about the utility monsters point but I think you are wrong about other points.

Used car prices were flat until the pandemic and have not recovered, but are way less than 2x before: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUSR0000SETA02

So no, car prices didn't double in 14 years, even including until today (yes, these are used cars, but if new cars became significantly more expensive demand would increase for used cars and drive up the price).

Front blind zones are driven mostly by aesthetics and rules lawyering around emissions regulations (CAFE) as far as I can tell.

I don't have an index of car features off the top of my head, but electronic stability control (mandated since 2011) has probably prevented some accidents (although it's hard to get a smoking gun here, unlike seatbelts or airbags or crumple zones).

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