Volvos, airbags and four wheel drives

Disclaimer: This blog is filled with black humour involving car safety and accidents. Please don’t read on if this is likely to upset.

OK, releasing unsupported scientific argument isn’t the best. But a quick google on airbags and driving patterns quickly brought up this which I thought was interesting because it’s an old article talking about old research.

But if you do the search yourself you will find a long list of articles that point out that the improvement in safety was far less than was expected by air-bags because people’s behaviour changed at the same time.

Which brings me onto 4-wheel drives. Why are 4-wheel drives so popular in the city? It’s not because of the rugged terrain in the ‘burbs. Most of them would be lucky to stray more than 3 km from home and the concept of an unsealed road damaging the duco would give the owners a mild coronary.

So despite the great outdoor ads for these vehicles, the truth of the matter is simple “if I’m going head first into an on-coming car, I’m going to be twice as big as the sucker coming the other way”. Being slightly more diplomatic, I’ve heard men say “I want to know my wife and kids are safe”.

The only problem is that we now have drivers in weapons of mass destruction who feel safe.

The solution?

How about every car be installed with a 1 foot long blade mounted just in front of the driver?

Let’s get rid of the perception of safety, and make the (not so passive) hint that an accident right now could be really, really bad for you.

Or maybe we should all just convert to hydrogen fuelled cars with big tanks of hydrogen in the back. Insurance premiums may even go down because the risk of permanent disability would be decreased.

In summary, the perception of safety undermines safety. In my next blog I actually make this relevant to OnSolution.