And this is why we used to make cars out of STEEL instead of FIBERGLASS! Sure, fiberglass is a lot lighter in weight and hence a hell of a lot better for gas mileage. But you hit anything at more than 20 mph and the entire body explodes off the fucking thing, and now you’re spending more to repair the car than it’s worth because you need a entire front end, read end, or side panel. They can’t just take the damaged section off, beat it out with a hammer, sand it, and repaint it.
Everything is made with the idea of it being easier to replace than to maintain, aka planned obsolescence. Thanks, capitalism
You guys are obscenely, dangerously wrong.
It’s not planned obsolescence, it’s physics.
Modern cars crumple to absorb and distribute the forces of impact in an accident in an effort to protect the occupants. When cars didn’t have those crumple zones, the occupants, being the soft, squishy things they were, took those forces and were mangled or killed in horrible ways. Also, those older cars took hidden damage that often went unnoticed and made them very dangerous to drive. IT’s really easy to hide a twisted frame when all you need to do to make the car look okay is a bit of sanding and paint.
I recently watched a TV show where a small sedan was run over by the trailer of an eighteen-wheeler. Run. Over. They had to unwrap the crumpled ball of a car from the undercarriage of that trailer. Guess what? The driver suffered only minor injuries because the car collapsed in exactly the way it was designed to so that she, in the very strong frame surrounding the passenger compartment, was protected.
And no, don’t thank capitalism for these modern cars. Thank Ralph Nader and countless other safety activists who worked tirelessly to make car manufacturers accountable for the safety of the people who drove their cars.
I’m an estimator for a major insurance company which means I spend all day, every day, around wrecked cars. I’ve been to the NHTSA, I’ve attended a crash test. I have actually seen and put hands on both the vehicles in the .gif above. The idea that old cars are somehow built better or are “tanks” or whatever is not only wrong, it’s dangerous. New cars are built to “crunch” so you don’t have to.
This is the 59 Bel Aire post crash – notice that the area where the driver sits is significantly compromised. The person driving this car would have died in this 35mph crash.
This is the Malibu – crunched? Yes! But the area where the driver sits is not crushed.
I have seen modern cars keep people alive in horrifying accidents. Cars are objectively better and safer in every single way than they were 10, 20, 30 years ago. Anyone who tells you otherwise is wrong. Period.
Also modern passenger cars are definitely not made of fiberglass. What even?
Dude! This is timely! An old friend of mine just got in a high-speed crash (t-boned at 45mph) the other day. Her car was totaled. All airbags deployed.
Her ONLY injury was a bruised tailbone.
Fuck yeah, crumple zones! 😀
Tl;dr version: When the car doesn’t absorb the impact of the crash, your body does instead.
