How “Safety” Requirements Make Your Car Less Actually Safe
[B' Spokes: America's obsession with "safe crashing" has gotten so perverse. Just as cycling should NOT be just wear a helmet, end of story, driving a car should not be about "I need a safe car to protect me from all the other idiots out there." We need harder driver licence test and we need stricter traffic enforcement with zero tolerance of traffic fatalities. Death should not be acceptable just so people can go really fast on roads that are not freeways.]
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By eric, Eric Peters Autos
The government enacts laws – or issues regulatory fatwas – requiring that new cars comply with various “safety” standards. Ironically, the result of these standards – in terms of vehicle design and otherwise – may just be cars that are less safe to actually drive.
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But reduced glass area means decreased visibility
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it is very hard to see cross traffic coming at you from either side - making it much more dangerous to enter a busy intersection. Blind spots are larger, too
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But that Band-Aid [back-up cameras] causes its own slew of problems, including limited peripheral view and a distorted view relative to what a functioning human eye connected to an operating human brain would otherwise perceive. It is much harder (if not impossible) to see a kid on a bike coming down the sidewalk into the path of the backing-up car – because the camera has a limited field of vision. It can’t “see” the kid until the kid is within its narrow field of vision. By which time, it is already too late.
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Driving around on three normal-sized tires and one skinny minny often results in a very evil-handling (and braking) car. ... But, your car got one-tenth of an MPG better gas mileage.
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<a href="http://ericpetersautos.com/2012/10/24/how-safety-requirements-may-make-your-car-less-actually-safe/">http://ericpetersautos.com/2012/10/24/how-safety-requirements-may-make-your-car-less-actually-safe/</a>;