Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
I also find this video impressive. This is the Volvo 850, which was introduced in 1993 to the US market. It looks like it would hold up much better than the 940 Wagon in the first video I posted.
Do you know the year of that car? The video was not in english but it was remarkable . Do you think a person could have survived that crash? Would a different car have done as well?
Well I read a lot about the computerized electronic parts breaking down and how they are expensive to repair. I read the posts of car owners complaining that they are experiencing a problem even the dealers cannot figure out how to fix, there have been scary events with cars like unintended acceleration that trial testimony showed was due in some cases to faulty computer code, and I see article after article about recalls of these computerized parts that are very dangerous, like most recently the airbags that explode metal parts into people, and finally my biggest concern is the ability to hack into these computerized cars a scenario that is actually starting to occur . All this makes me long for a simpler kind of car.
And that brings me to another issue, now the automakers are using these fancy computerized parts as an excuse to try to prevent car owners from being able to repair their own cars. They actually tried to use copyright laws based on the Digital Millenium Copyright act to prevent car owners from working on their own cars but thankfully common sense prevailed and they lost. They now have created an exemption in that law for car owners.
Automakers don't repair cars. Independent dealers do. The Ford dealership is owned by a businessman in your town, or otherwise Autonation or Sonic, not Ford Motor Company. Just like the McDonalds. The EPA doesn't want consumers to do it because consumers will hack the emissions controls in pursuit of better performance.
I think that working on cars is easier these days. You can find everything online, usually a youtube video, and don't have to go digging through a Chilton's manual. Yes, there is a big plastic cover over the motor, but you can remove it quite simply.
Dealers being unable to diagnose problems isn't new either. You can listen to Cartalk on NPR (they are reruns, many times very old ones) and people have all sorts of problems with their 70's, 80's and 90's cars they can't fix and their mechanics can't zero in on either.
The cars may be "simpler" but they certainly weren't more reliable or cheaper to keep on the road. Your still looking at old wiring (cars have had wiring and electrical problems since they had turn signals and head lights,) old rubber, harder to find parts, etc...There are, and always have been, good cars and bad cars, put out by most all manufacturers, throughout time.
Recalls aren't new either. Neither is "unintended Acceleration." The infamous Audi 5000's were manufactured in 1982. 34 years ago.
What is your concern about your car getting "hacked?" Do you think ISIS is going to hack your car and drive you off a bridge? Possible, but then so was winning the powerball and getting hit by lightning. It could be used to steal the car, but again, why is that more of a concern now than in the past? In the past, all it took was a screw driver and a hammer. Now it might require a more complicated computer. My neighbor's truck (at least 15 y/o) was stolen and the thief was caught with a "computer," that was essentially a box he plugged into it to circumvent the anti theft system. Again, nothing new.
If you want a simpler car with fewer gee-gaws, go ahead. They make them. I had a 2015 base model Malibu that was simple enough. The Kia Soul comes to mind.
But your obsessive compulsion/fear about modern technology in your car, despite all rational, numeric data to tell you that it is safer, tells me you really belong on a therapists couch or a train or a bus before you get on a car (and don't think buses and trains aren't computer laden, either.)
You are engaging in confirmation bias; it is the same thinking that leads people to shore up their views on eating paleo, buying organic, or not vaccinating their kids. You see a lot of words that you don't understand, and therefore equate it to danger. By the way, Dihydrogen Monoxide can corrode a steel bar. You should stop drinking it.
Your avoidance of all things technological in cars is akin to someone that avoids air travel because of fear of plane crashes. Yes, it is a possibility, but air travel is the safest way to travel. Think of all the technology and computers on airplanes next time you board. Technology isn't 100% reliable or safe, but new technology in cars is safer than old technology.
What is your concern about your car getting "hacked?" Do you think ISIS is going to hack your car and drive you off a bridge? Possible, but then so was winning the powerball and getting hit by lightning. It could be used to steal the car, but again, why is that more of a concern now than in the past? In the past, all it took was a screw driver and a hammer. Now it might require a more complicated computer. My neighbor's truck (at least 15 y/o) was stolen and the thief was caught with a "computer," that was essentially a box he plugged into it to circumvent the anti theft system. Again, nothing new.
But your obsessive compulsion/fear about modern technology in your car, despite all rational, numeric data to tell you that it is safer, tells me you really belong on a therapists couch or a train or a bus before you get on a car (and don't think buses and trains aren't computer laden, either.)
Starting to wonder who you work for that you keep attacking me? You also did not respond very well to the part of my post about the very real attempt recently by automakers to try to make it illegal for people to work on their own cars using copyright laws to try to force people to pay a dealer.
here is a quote from the article :
"Some of the industries leading companies are now claiming that their software has become so complicated that “tampering with it,” or making repairs on your own property, could be a copyright violation.Interestingly enough, Tesla, the company which has the most complicated technology in their vehicles, is not in support of this legal action. [2]
Companies like GM and Ford want to reclassify cars as “mobile computing devices” so that they can use DMCA to enforce copyright laws- all of this would be potentially disadvantageous to consumers."
So you call things like airbags that explode and spit metal out at people safer ? Or hackable technology that the automakers have not tried to protect cars from ? There are now lawsuits against the automakers for this hackable technology you think is no big deal but I guess you think the attorneys are in need a mental health services too?
Or the two senators who have constructed legislation to protect people who own cars with hackable technology. I guess you question their mental state ?
Starting to wonder who you work for that you keep attacking me? You also did not respond very well to the part of my post about the very real attempt recently by automakers to try to make it illegal for people to work on their own cars using copyright laws to try to force people to pay a dealer.
See, there you go again, you accused everyone that argued against your last thread of having financial interests contrary to your safety. I don't work for anyone that has an interest in you buying a new car. And I'm not attacking you. I'm just trying to understand where your paranoia comes from. I think its really like people that refuse to fly for safety reasons, preferring to drive, even though their car is much more dangerous than an airplane.
Quote:
Originally Posted by vanguardisle
So you call things like airbags that explode and spit metal out at people safer ?
No, I think that cars that have an airbag are safer than cars that don't. I understand that some airbags were defective, and if I were to buy a car, I would check it against open recalls to have it fixed. Honda, for example, said that there were 100 people injured and 8 killed from their airbags during the Takata fiasco. There were 5.7 Million car accidents in 2013, and 1.6 million people injured in car accidents. It isn't as if every single Takata airbag spit metal and killed or injured someone when it deployed. Furthermore, they recalled the cars to fix the problem. If you look at the graph, injuries are going down per million miles traveled, and that has nothing to do with better emergency medicine.
Or hackable technology that the automakers have not tried to protect? I have read the good but I have also read twice as much about the bad. I have decided to play it safe that is all.
You are playing it safe and protecting against the theoretical potential of a problem, not an actual problem. NO HACKER HAS EVER TAKEN CONTROL OF A STRANGERS CAR. Never. Not even once. The jeep was hacked after researchers bought it and worked on it full time for a year. The other common example took researchers years, and by the time they brought it out, the manufacturer had updated the software to block it while the car was on the road. Furthermore, it requires a car with a built in internet connection, and most cars don't have that, even brand new cars.
there is a shocking lack of crash test information and ratings on cars pre 2004 especially from the IIHS secondly even when the NHTSA takes up the slack and provides some information the results are often different from the IIHS,
All new cars sold in the US have to be crashed frontward into a solid barrier at 30 MPH and protect test dummies in the front seats, but I believe manufacturers can choose to substitute a sled that quickly jerks the car, and they choose the sled because it's easier.
A former Ford, Chrysler, VW engineer who specialized in designing the crash safety structures of cars, including the original Ford Taurus, said the federal government's 35 MPH full frontal solid barrier test was a better predictor of front crash survival than the IIHS offset test (40 MPH into a soft barrier, sort of like crashing into a parked car), and he did not trust results unless the test was repeated at least 5 times, something the IIHS did not do at the time he said this (and probably still does not). His advice was to buy the heaviest vehicle affordable with the best federal 35 MPH results.
MotorTrend.com used to have government and IIHS crash test results for almost every car, going back to about 1980, but I can't find the kind of detailed information they used to post there, which included the actual test result numbers, not just star ratings. You may also want to try searching for NCAP (new car assessment program) and also terms like femur, HIC (head impact criteria), and chest (how fast the torso stops).
Newer cars are safer. A few decades ago, HIC scores of about 1,000 were common, but now you rarely see anything above about 600, and I think floors have gotten stronger because the femur loads are also down. Plus side airbags really, really help in side crashes.
Crash test results can vary by the size of the crash test dummy chosen, which affects how the seats are positioned, and even by the vehicle's body style. For example, back in the 1970s or 1980s, one Nissan's sedan version gave good crash test results while the hatchback for the same model did poorly, and a VW did better in the 2-door version than the 4-door. This does not mean 2-door cars or sedans are always safer because for other vehicles the rankings were the opposite; I'm just saying you can't always generalize. And in crashes between vehicles, typically the occupants of the vehicle that's higher will do better than those in the lower one, and a car with a sloped hood is more likely to go under a truck and the car's occupants heads chopped off.
Safety features like ABS, traction control, and stability control should just quit working if something goes wrong with them, making the car act just like one without those features, only with blinking warning lights to nag you. The systems check themselves a lot. For example, the computer checks if the airbag force sensors vary in readings as the car speeds up and slows down, and if there are no variations in sensor readings for a long time, the computer assumes something is wrong. Then you'll need the problem diagnosed by a real mechanic who can pinpoint the defects, not a junior grade parts swapper who replace parts until he gets lucky or the bill reaches $1,000. Car computers are so fancy now that cars even weigh themselves when you accelerate. They may use components very similar to those in your PC, but a lot more care was taken in the design of the hardware and software.
There's no debate about whether unibody or body-on-frame is safer in crashes. Either constructon can be made very safe, but less metal is needed to do so with a unibody.
Strength isn't everything. A car can be built like a battering ram so it doesn't collapse horizontally as much in a crash, causing higher forces to be transmitted to the occupants. That was seen when the US government stated to do the 35 MPH frontal solid barrier test in the late 1970s or early 1980s and a Mercedes got poor results because its front crush space collapsed only about half as much as average. The best results were for a Ford Mustang and GM's FWD X cars, like the Chevy Citation, while Japanese cars did horribly, as did a Volvo. The moral her is, don't trust marketing hype about safety.
I don't know how prone modified lowrider vehicles are to rolling over, but Virginia Tech found that jacked up trucks were almost 30 times as likely to crash as average cars. I don't know how much of that was due to the vehicles being raised up versus being driven by idiots. And while lowering a vehicle may make it less prone to rolling over, but it could affect how well it steers.
Car computers have been designed to be hard to hack because originally car makers didn't want people modifying the program that controlled the fuel & emissions systems, but I assume car makers are also plenty paranoid about wanting their computers not causing crashes. If you check some videos of car computer teardowns, such as at EEvblog.com, you'll see that the quality is very high -- no Chinese components, and some computers contain a second computer to continuously monitor the first one.
The Chevy ignition switch problem was just awful quality control, probably what's to be expected in a poorly run bureaucracy that encourages people to be team players who don't make waves instead of doing the right thing. OTOH apparently the Toyota acceleration problem was either all due to accelerator pedals rubbing the floor mat or didn't exist. Popular Mechanics had an article explaining how the gas pedal interfaced to the computer in the Prius and revealed plenty of healthy paranoia in the design.
Cars, despite being more complex than ever, are also more reliable than ever. In the 1970s, Consumer Reports would count 10-20 initial defects per new car, including serious stuff like the engine valves being adjusted wrong (kind of common), then in the 1990s that count dropped to maybe 0-2, and for the last decade or so virtually none of their test cars have shown initial defects.
Do not get a Volvo. Their engines are considered very durable, but otherwise the cars are not up there in reliability, and parts are expensive. If you want a plain Jane car, you'll need to go back to the early 1980s, the last time cars were made with carburetors and no computers, but most cars for the US market got computers in 1981 (to meet pollution standards), some transmissions were computer controlled in the mid-1980s and almost universally so by the early 1990s, and airbags were in all cars by about 1994. Cars without computers were not necessarily more reliable, as any mechanic who worked on vacuum-controlled fuel/emissions systems of 1970s cars can tell you. Problems with stalling and stumbling were so common that Consumer Reports always commented about this until fuel injection became universal.
Last edited by larrymoencurly; 02-04-2016 at 05:31 AM..
Well I read a lot about the computerized electronic parts breaking down and how they are expensive to repair. I read the posts of car owners complaining that they are experiencing a problem even the dealers cannot figure out how to fix, there have been scary events with cars like unintended acceleration that trial testimony showed was due in some cases to faulty computer code, and I see article after article about recalls of these computerized parts that are very dangerous, like most recently the airbags that explode metal parts into people, and finally my biggest concern is the ability to hack into these computerized cars a scenario that is actually starting to occur . All this makes me long for a simpler kind of car.
And that brings me to another issue, now the automakers are using these fancy computerized parts as an excuse to try to prevent car owners from being able to repair their own cars. They actually tried to use copyright laws based on the Digital Millenium Copyright act to prevent car owners from working on their own cars but thankfully common sense prevailed and they lost. They now have created an exemption in that law for car owners.
"Against vehement opposition from automakers (and the Environmental Protection Agency) who claimed that safety and emissions would be compromised (along with their expensive, often exclusive diagnostic tools required by their franchised dealer partners), the supporters for exemption included such a broad coalition as SEMA, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (“EFFâ€) and even the American Automobile Association, all arguing in the name of common sense."
You have a couple of different things here.
First, sure you can "read a lot about" a variety of things. The things you're reading about are news because they are so rare. It sounds that your anxiety is focussed on computerized components because computers seem uniquely vulnerable or mysterious to you. (Although I suspect you have no greater understanding of how the conventional components of an automobile work.) In fact, no matter what the parts look like, cars today are much safer and more reliable than they have ever been. Don't get overwhelmed by theoretical possibilities.
Second is the DMCA issue. I agree that manufacturers are throwing their weight around, but this is not a prohibition of repairing cars, but a much more limited argument about vehicle purchasers reprogramming the software embedded in what they buy. I agree that they should be allowed to do it, but like your concern about what you read, it does not detract in the least from the safety and reliability of modern vehicles.
I do think the idea of a car crumpling to adsorb shock is an interesting one and probably a good one, but it can't crumple like that when being hit in the side . Is there some other way to absorb shock besides crumpling ?
No, and for side crashes there's not nearly much room available for crumpling. Ever hear of those tandem parachute jumps where something goes wrong, so the instructor flips around to be on bottom to lessen the ground impact? The instructor dies, but sometimes the student on top lives, albeit with severe injuries, all because of a crumple zone of just 10 inches, and that's probably a 50-90 MPH impact (I assume a parachute that deploys even slightly slows down the fall). That should give you an idea of how much better protection can be if the crumpling happens more evenly over time.
All cars have crumple zones, whether intended or not, and around 1975 the US became the first country to require cars to pass crash tests in order to be sold.
The way I look at it every car out there is safer than the one made 5 years ago. In 5 years the one you are driving now wont be as safe as a brand new one. A car that scores amazing today, if tested in 10 years may score poorly compared to a new one. I am not going to chase cars based on crash ratings and safety.
I'm not so sure. The 1980 GM X cars did very well in the government's 35 MPH solid barrier test, and one of the front occupants would have likely survived even at 40 MPH. And my 1986 Corolla got head injury scores of less than 600 points, while the newer version around 1989-1992 did worse, with 1,000 points and higher chest deceleration. Around 1984, the Pontiac Fiero got one of the best head injury scores, around 350 points, something that's not very common even now.
I would love to get hold of whatever computer simulation software the auto manufacturers use to test their cars and use it to test the cars that do not have enough IIHS rating information.
I don't know how much computing power is needed to run those simulations in a reasonable amount of time, but over a decade ago Ford had software that would show different results for the crash test dummies if a factory magnesium radiator bracket was replaced with an aftermarket plastic one.
I'm not so sure. The 1980 GM X cars did very well in the government's 35 MPH solid barrier test, and one of the front occupants would have likely survived even at 40 MPH. And my 1986 Corolla got head injury scores of less than 600 points, while the newer version around 1989-1992 did worse, with 1,000 points and higher chest deceleration. Around 1984, the Pontiac Fiero got one of the best head injury scores, around 350 points, something that's not very common even now.
As you can see I clearly do not pay attention to safety ratings, haha. My thoughts are just assumptions. With that being said I would be fine driving a frame down the road with 4 wheels, engine and seat.
I think being safe is also in the eye of the beholder. I look at these smart cars which apparently got great safety ratings but I wouldn't feel as safe in one of those as I do in my truck which probably got far worse safety ratings.
In the end, I feel when its my time to go, its my time and every safety precaution in the world wont prevent the inevitable.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
