I borrowed my mother's (edit 1968) Mini for a week, after my Land Rover series 3 fell to bits. This was mid-1990s. The suspension was unpleasant and painful to anyone in the vehicle. It was hard as nails. Definitely fun, until you accidentally lose it going around a roundabout at which point your sense of mortality re-appears and you wish you were driving anything else.
The original minis are such death traps I am surprised when ever I see one on the road - firstly how is anyone foolhardy enough to drive one and secondly how did it manage to survive to 2017.
In the mid 90s I answered an ad to tech some guy Autocad. He lived outside Seattle - and had a very large, rather eccentric house in the woods.
I'd go over a couple times a month to teach him autocad so he could design the various add-on projects he wanted to do to his house.
In a side garage, he had two brand new, mint condition minis that had never been driven. They were beautiful.
I tried to convince him that I'd teach him autocad full time in exchange for one of the minis.
That didn't work; what he told me was that in the 60s he'd been over in the U.K., and that he had two shipping containers loaded with minis and shipped them back to the US - he sold them off over time, but he kept the two.
One he was about to start driving - and the other he said will never be driven "it's going to be my coffin, I am going to be buried in it"
There are still plenty of people riding motorcycles, which are statistically far more dangerous. At least around here, not everyone thinks safety is the most important (and IMHO that's a good thing.)
If safety was the most important thing, everyone would be driving the same car, no one would be driving motorcycles, and no one would get on the freeway with an SUV.
Other factors like available seating, looks, price, and creature comforts often take precedence over safety in the minds of many consumers.
If safety was the most important thing, nobody would be driving a car at all. There are lots of ways to get from point A to point B, just about all of which are safer than driving.
We drive cars because they hit a sweet spot of speed, personal autonomy, and comparative expense, with a cost to personal safety that we've collectively decided we're willing to live with.
I think I disagree a bit. Maybe safety is not the most important thing but it is pretty high up on the list of anyone with a certain awareness (victim of car accident, lost someone dear in a car accident, has a family, etc.) One reason SUVs have sucked the air out of automotive variety is their perceived safety, even over minivans (I am talking perception here, not reality).
Another reason is that cars have gotten increasingly safer and safe designs don't scream safety so it has gotten easy to ignore how important safety is and how bad things used to be in older cars. A minor crash in a 50s and earlier car would likely result in death or severe injury due to the lack of seat belts, lack of crumple zones, metal bayonets knobs on the dashboard, metal dashboards, etc.
A minor crash in a 50s and earlier car would likely result in death or severe injury due to the lack of seat belts, lack of crumple zones, metal bayonets knobs on the dashboard, metal dashboards, etc.
Pre-50s is definitely going to be quite fragile, but it really depends what you mean by "minor". In a major crash, a modern car is going to be far safer, but in a minor one both the passenger and an older car are likely to survive with nearly no damage, whereas a modern car, although with the same outcome for the passenger, may be damaged extensively. Late 70s/early 80s bumpers were probably the best designed for this.
I am not sure about that. Seat belts were not mandated in the 50s so a crash resulted in significant passenger movement. Metal dashboards with bayonet knobs tended to cause significant damage based on my reading. I noticed that you put the link to the Lifeguard package in another reply but that was just a package available to some cars and was not bought in a prevalent manner by the public.
I was riding in the middle on the front bench seat of an old 70's car with no seatbelt on the highway a while ago (only other option was walking 50 km back home).
I have no idea how people used to think that it was at all safe, I was very aware that if the car crashed I was going to be ejected out the window, even in a low speed crash.
Remember that offering is not quite the same as available. From your link, it seems that Ford offered this as a package starting in 1956 for some models and it did not sell well [1]; some accuse it of making a half-hearted effort. However, I have to say that kudos to Ford and Robert McNamara for trying to sell safety and offering safer options well before others.
1968 was apparently the first year that seat belts were mandated in cars.
Aren't a number of SUVs less safe than cars? Particularly, I seem to recall that cheap, top-heavy SUVs built on a car base (instead of a truck base) are way more likely to tip or roll over in an accident.
It is my understanding from anecdotal evidence that perception reins over reality in this case. SUVs do have a mass advantage so they were expected to win in a collision with a compact car. They also project ruggedness, which is equated with safety.
Well, in the case of motorcycles, they are unsafe primarily for the driver, and not really for anyone else, so as long as the driver is aware of the danger they pose to themselves, there is no issue.
You can indeed, and I have done so, ever since the things became mandatory many years ago.
I wouldn't ever drive ten meters without my belt on, but I'm all for the freedom of anyone to be an idiot, as long as the idiocy isn't directed at anyone else.
The idiocy of not wearing a seatbelt is directed at everyone else. An unbelted driver is more likely to completely lose control of the vehicle after an initial collision and end up causing addition damage to others. Plus now that we effectively have socialized medicine we all end up paying for the idiots.
Although decapitation by windshield is unlikely (due to their design), you don't have to be going very fast to seriously damage yourself on the windshield if you're not wearing a seat belt.
I crashed a truck once, going maybe 30-40 km/h, wearing a seat belt. I ended up with some minor bruising from the seat belt, and no other damage, but everything else in the car went flying, including the glasses off my head. If I wasn't belted up, my head would've hit the windshield or steering wheel quite hard, and I likely would've needed to go to the hospital.
In my opinion, If people REALLY cared about safety, we'd all have roll cages, harnesses, helmets and driver's suits. Convenience generally trumps real safety. Safety only becomes popular when there's no user intervention required and people don't notice the costs.
My parents met because my father wanted to do sort of a Grand Tour(well, not so grand given the vehicle) and my mother wanted to get to France, because she landed a job as an au pair, but she wanted to save on transport.
How they managed to get there(through Hungary) in this little two-stroke boggles the mind.
Actually four-stroke (but two cyinders and air cooled, later a different water cooled version with a bigger and different engine was made in Poland).
The FIAT 126 is the "evolution" of the more famous (and older) FIAT 500 and uses almost exactly the same engine, with capacity increased from 500 cm3 to 600 or 650 cm3.
It's worth noting that the last one came off the production line in October 2000; the later ones surviving isn't that much an accomplishment. (And yes, it may well be the case the majority of Minis produced had been scrapped before the last was one produced!)
Go back another 100 years, and think about the vehicles and their suspension (probably leather bands?), and then realize that there were no asphalt roads, only dirt roads with holes and rocks. Then go back several hundred years, when carriages had no suspension at all.
How did people handle that? Speed was probably the big difference. Plus what else was there? The only alternative was walking or maybe travel by horse or mule.
So that 1968 Mini was probably very OK for that time, with careful driving, and a tougher ass.
Speed was the big difference. It's interesting that speed limits in the U.K. haven't increased since the first motorway was opened in 1958, yet cars have got a lot safer. I wonder if autonomous vehicles will change that...
Fascinating. I wonder if it's possible to control for improved car safety when looking at the decreasing risk of driving over time; did speed limits make highways/motorways safer or more dangerous? I recall reading that (counter-intuitively), removing stop signs from a residential area made it safer, and I wonder if the same is true for speed limits. Maybe if people weren't given a suggestion of how fast to drive, they would be more likely to drive within their personal safety limit (whether that be faster or slower).
> Maybe if people weren't given a suggestion of how fast to drive, they would be more likely to drive within their personal safety limit (whether that be faster or slower).
I have the impression that this is very different in most of Europe compared with most of the places in the US I've driven: in the US, most roads have a speed limit ultimately set to the lower of what's politically acceptable and what an engineering is willing to sign off on as safe, AFAIK; in most parts of Europe, there are two or three standard speed limits (urban, rural, highway) that apply everywhere and speed limits are only altered downwards if there's a stretch that's a particular crash hotspot.
For example, I've been down plenty of narrow roads around the UK where the speed limit was the standard 60mph, but good luck going more than 20mph even if you know the road well. As such, you're already expected to use personal judgement. By comparison, all of the rural roads in the US I've driven down that were at all tight had speed limits like 20 or 30mph, and if anything they were set lower than I would've driven down them had they been higher.
Human reaction times haven't increased, that's probably the main issue with speed. It's also not generally very eco-friendly to drive faster, so I doubt limits are going to increase regardless of safety.
