Really?

The ancient ones, the humans who lived before my birth - those who launched rockets to the moon and detonated city destroying bombs with atomic power, feats no country has matched in these declining years of civilisation - they also had faster than sound passenger aircraft.

Although it might be the tendency to exaggerate stories with time, rose-tinted glasses and the myth of the noble-savage.

There's a common theme amongst many of those heroic feats: They tended to occasionally catch fire, fall out of the sky and/or explode at inopportune times.

It's the difference between prototype and a production. The Saturn V rocket and the Concorde were both prototype-grade vehicles. The marvel of them is that they worked at all. Now that we've proved the point, we won't put either "into production" unless it's reliable enough to be boring.

'Production quality' things spontaneously catch fire these days, too.

http://www.theclever.com/20-dangerous-cars-with-the-highest-...