This. If you are completely surrounded by light trucks as you grow up, then you are much less likely to ever think of actual cars (muscle or otherwise) at all. I grew up around 2000 lbs BMW 2002's (and the like) - a kind of vehicle that simply has vanished. So I could imagine lightweight sport sedans as a thing. If all you know are SUV's your concept of vehicle is going to be very different...
Auto journalists keep repeating in the same deadpan voice as the brainwashed soldiers from The Manchurian Candidate that Americans exclusively want big vehicles. It's not that there isn't some truth in that but the real truth is that (a) the publications won't get any chance to review vehicles if they don't toe the line [1] and (b) since the 1970s if you went to an American car dealer trying to buy a size S car they would try to sell you an L, looking for a size L they would try to sell you an XXL, etc. I remember going to car dealerships with my dad, there was a brief moment after the 2008 financial crisis that this wasn't the case, but by 2015 the major Japanese brands of Honda and Toyota were doing the same.
[1] One take on the fall of Intel was that they were "high on their own supply" for the last 15 years and journalists were too intimidated to tell them they were wrong with the exception of Charlie Demerjian
My second car was a 1978 Buick Riviera. 17.5 feet in length, two doors, rear wheel drive, 403cuin 8 cylinder. It weighs in at 3500 lbs, had 15 mph rated bumpers with shocks attached to the frame. Steel roll cage, double steel doors.
The car was a beast. You could fit 7 adults in the car and two dead bodies in the trunk.
My grandmother was t-boned in it. They straightened the door and replaced the glass and it was good as new.
That was a big car!
I wish I could buy a car like that with modern antilock brakes, transmission. Instead it’s all trucks and SUVs because people like my mother feel “safer” and like seeing from up high.
Look at the specs of a modern vehicle. Any contact over 5mph and you are replacing the plastic bumper. Actually have an airbag go off and you are probably looking at a totaled vehicle.
That really took me back. In the 80s my mom drove a mid-70s, 2-door Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme. Itt was just under 17 feet long, also two doors, and I believe rear-wheel drive, with a fairly large engine. If memory serves (sigh, it often doesn't), my mom even called it "the beast". I laughed out loud at your "two dead bodies in the trunk" -- yup, checks out.
I'm torn, though, on your idea to have a car like that with modern (safety) features. I hate all the trucks and SUVs out on the road, and I drive a mid-sized sedan. And I agree with you on how easy it is to damage that car. But man those old cars were so heavy. I can't imagine getting decent gas mileage (or good BEV range) on one today.
Your perception about the safety of 1970s cars is off - you are massively less likely to die or be seriously injured in a car built in 2025 than any car in any car built in the 1970s.
70s and 80s cars were built for the little "whoopsie that's a mailbox", "didn't see you merging there" and "oh golly me, this snow sure is slick, and that's a ditch right there" mishaps that are the overwhelmingly dominant form of vehicle accidents. If you didn't actually care to fix things, many accidents that would be thousands of dollars today were $0 back then because required systems remained functional (that was the whole point of those mandated 10mph bumpers).
If your want to survive hitting stopped traffic at 40mph because you were too busy shitposting in traffic, modern car all the way. Depending on the details you may very well walk away without a scratch. It's really marvelous how good they are at keeping people uninjured, or at least alive.
But the overwhelming majority of people's driving experience reflects the former accident type, not the latter, hence why people have the opinions they do. And you can't really blame them. The odds of any given person being in an injurious accident in their life are low, lower still if you avoid a few key behaviors everyone agrees are bad.
In the 70s there we about 1/4 as many cars on the road in my country compared to today, but 5 times as many road deaths.
People got killed or seriously injured all the time before improvement in safety standards. As a society having to replace 50 $1000 bumpers to save 1 person being seriously injured is a great deal.
You're basically using the outlier here to mislead about the typical/median and erroneously implying that they're more linked than they are.
40-50yr ago in the era of 10mph bumpers and whatnot the typical experience was superior because the typical driver is experiencing minor no-injury mishaps. Sliding off the road in the snow at low speed was a tow truck bill and only that, not $2k just to get the car drivable again.
Buuuuuuut, the results for the minority of drivers experiencing injurious crashes was way, way worse back then, as the people who screech about stats are happy to tell you.
What makes a car cheap to repair for the average user getting in the median or average accident and survivable for the guy who gets piss drunk and drives off a cliff are mostly tangential from each other. There's no reason we can't have both and there's no reasonable and non-malicious reason to hide or downplay the regression on this axis. Modern cars would likely perform way better than old cars if shrugging off minor accidents was not a decreased design priority due to stiffer cabins and other changes in construction.
The stuff that makes modern cars get totaled in minor hits is mostly a reflection of styling and fuel economy based choices.
The typical driver was significantly more likely to die back then. Modern cars shrug off small accidents too - you just end up with dents or scratches or other ugly but cosmetic body damage.
The thing that makes modern cars so easy to total is unibody construction. We do that to save on costs, but also because it leads to better ride quality and fuel efficiency.
Bumpers from the 80s and early 90s were more substantial and outset from the vehicle. If a 5mph impact did anything to the bumper, it took the hit and the rest of the car was generally fine. The bumper was easy enough to replace because it was external to the vehicle.
Modern cars don't have external bumpers and what you see on the outside of the car is a "bumper cover". The actual bumper is under that and no longer spans the whole front/rear of the car to the sides. Many new front bumpers don't go past the headlights.
So in a 5mph crash in a modern car, the bumper cover (made of plastic and held on by plastic) takes the impact and generally gets destroyed. Replacing it costs several hundred dollars in parts before paint (because they're all painted). There's also more labor involved in replacing it because it's so integrated to the car. Bumper covers now clip into both fenders, core support, and undercladding and removal means working with all of those parts, then lining up body lines after.
I think it's less a comment about serious accidents and more a comment on getting rear ended at a stop light now costing $600+ in repairs even if your airbags didn't pop.
And cars from the 30's-50's were often tank-like by comparison. You get into a high-speed accident in one of those and they would just shovel out the raspberry jam you turned into, hose down the inside, tug on the frame a little to line everything back up and put it back out on the lot.
The zone's #1 job is to buy enough time for the airbags to inflate during a crash at speed. Occupants moving forward toward the space the airbags will occupy as the vehicle stops and then being hit by an airbag attempting to occupy that space would be bad.
The degree to which crumple zones attenuate forces felt in a crash is fairly minimal in low speed crashes because in order to have enough time for airbags to inflate in a 100+mph crash they are necessarily quite stiff.
I believe you're misunderstanding the security and safety design nature of modern cars vs. older ones from something like the 70's, 80s or earlier.
I've seen a number of crash test videos comparing modern 21st century cars in collisions with solid, unmovable obstacles at high speed, compared to those old cars, and while yes, the old cars had external features that let them more cheaply and functionally deal with minor accidents, they would be totaled by any truly heavy impact, with lethal results for their drivers.
Modern cars on the other hand may be more externally fragile even for minor hits and easily get damaged in ways that lead to thousands in repair costs for all their interconnected, electronically sensitive alarms and sensors, but for enduring high-velocity impacts, they're often fucking tanks when it comes to fundamentally protecting their occupants. Under that fragile exterior of any decent modern car is a remarkable security construct that isn't easily visible, right up until it shows its mettle after your car slams into a wall, and keeps you alive, at some speed that would have annihilated some supposedly tough muscle car from the 70s.
Go search for these on YouTube, they viscerally showcase the difference in the best (and most entertaining) possible way, by trying to catastrophically destroy both kinds of car.
There's a lot of electronic tracking, spyware, junkware, over-complication pushing that I absolutely despise about the modern auto manufacturing industry (partly because of legal mandates and partly out of general shittiness from the makers themselves) but for safety, they're impressive.
EDIT: Here's just one example. The occupants of the Malibu would have survived this crash with minor injuries. Anyone driving the 59 Bel Air would have been turned into a mangled disaster of broken bones and crushed body parts. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uoShPiK6878
A lot of this is true, but also, look at the safety records of those modern vehicles. They protect the driver a LOT better. A totaled car is just a car. Getting paralyzed or killed is a lot harder to fix.
seems very much in line then (given the lower rates before 1992). "Further investigation" was perhaps motivated by the search for something besides truth?
Budget car buyers aren't driving the market - especially not the market for new cars. In the US income inequality has gotten to the point where most new cars are bought by upper income customers. And they want fancy SUVs. Budget car buyers purchase their cars in the used market. For them it would in fact make sense to purchase less expensive more efficient vehicles. But they don't get a vote (in theory a lower depreciation for such vehicles should flow up, but I don't think that signal really gets anywhere now.)
I was there starting in 86 and I can tell you that at least some of the Lisa folks were still upset about how the project was treated. I think there's an argument that preserving the Lisa as a high end product would have made sense. The workstation market remained a thing for some time (think Sun) and having a common application base spread across a consumer and workstation-ish product line could have been very lucrative, especially in the late 80's and early 90's when Apple really started to lose steam. Internal efforts to come up with a Mac OS that took advantage of memory protection hardware (available as an option starting with the 68020 and becoming built in starting with the 030, I seem to remember) ran into challenges and their failure limited Apple's ability to differentiate against Windows. (Heck MS ended up arguably beating Apple to a high/low strategy with 95/NT.) Also the Lisa folks I knew tended to be more principled designers than the hack-forward Mac team. Pushing forward with both sort of folks leading would have preserved an essential creative tension that the company kinda lost as a result of stomping on the Lisa team.
Yes this is exactly my point. The Mac was a semi-expedient branching point in an effort to get an idea to market, but that's not really the sum of it. Choices were clearly made for personal and political reasons, and it cost Apple 10 years later when it had no answer for Windows NT or Unix.
And I don't think it was about "worse is better" -- they shipped the org chart, really, forked a new team under Jobs to make a "like Lisa but cheap" but it wasn't just "but cheap", it was 100% incompatible, and sacrificed on basic engineering fundamentals.
It also makes no sense to me. The Lisa hardware was expensive, but I think LisaOS could have been made to run on less expensive hardware by jettisoning features, and then picked up again later. Instead because of personalities and org chart they went and made a completely incompatible other-thing that looked like LisaOS without being it, duplicating effort and creating internal ill will, and short circuiting potential futures.
Anyways, Jobs profited it off it twice. Ego satisfaction with shipping the Mac, and killing off the Lisa -- his grudge/nemesis. And then again when Apple was forced to come to him 10 years later and buy NeXTstep because of what Jobs had done in 84.
Another weirdness was that for the first couple of years of the Mac's existence you had to have a Lisa if you wanted to write code for it. The Mac had so little RAM that it couldn't run a Pascal compiler. For this reason, when I bought a Mac in 1984 I also bought a Lisa with a huge 5MB (!) hard drive.
You bring up a great point though: Whatever happened to LisaOS? Did anybody archive the source anywhere or did it completely vanish?
I briefly looked at it, it's a pile of Object Pascal and M68k asssembly. I haven't looked to see if anybody has managed to make it compile in any kind of available-today compiler yet.
Which is one reason why I often still shoot with an actual camera and sometimes even with film. I have a lifetime of experience with common film emulsions and a couple of decades of shooting with digital sensors with limited post processing.
When does that matter? It matters when I take pictures to remember what a moment was like. In particular, what the light was doing with the people or landscape at that point in time.
It's not so much that the familiar photographic workflows are more accurate, but they are more deterministic and I understand what they mean and how they filter those moments.
I still use my phone (easy has a quality of its own) but I find that it gives me a choice of either an opinionated workflow that overwhelms the actual moment (trying to make all moments the same moment) or a complex workflow that leaves me having to make the choices (and thus work) I do with a traditional camera but with much poorer starting material.
If you have a corpus of documents you are working with (say thousands of pages of related standards docs), Notebook can be handy for doing targeted summaries of aspects of the docs with pointers back into the actual docs to the relevant source material. That's something I end up needing a lot (I've never used the podcast feature) and so it feels very differentiated to me...
Pro tip look for an industry that works for big capable customers that can defend themselves. Helps to create a structure of accountability inside a company that you can connect to as someone trying to have a positive career. Doesn't mean everything will be perfect, but it is easier than pushing against the stream in a company that "serves"[1] a disaggregated (and thus mostly defenseless) customer base.
Anti-lock brakes, if I remember correctly, had essentially no safety effect in the real world. Stability control, on the other hand, dropped single car accidents by something like a third. Perhaps you were thinking of that?
Regardless of that, the threat environment has changed pretty dramatically in the last two decades. I gave up my 2006 VW sedan for a new SUV this year because the IIHS numbers had started to look bad for lighter vehicles.
Back in 2006 the previous gen VW Passat was basically as safe as anything you could buy (according to their dataset). Now you need something a lot bigger to be upper tier.
The new vehicle is a plug-in so in the first 4 months of driving I've more than doubled my fuel efficiency. So there's that, anyway.
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