And buying a pre-2000 car involves giving up a lot of safety. That’s before regulators started looking at partial offset crashes, so older cars perform poorly if you clip a pole or oncoming vehicle with one of the headlamps.

You gain basically nothing in safety from the adoption of airbags in the early 90s to the improvements in roof strength and passenger cabins in the mid-00s (many models had their improvements in the early 00s because the regulations were known in advance). From there nothing changes until the proliferation of side curtain airbags.

Safety as a step function, basically.

>Unfortunately, modern regulations forbid manufacturers from easily making a "dumb car".

This is not true.

See https://globalcar.com/11-car-safety-systems-to-become-mandat... . I won't list them all, just the non-dumb features:

- Alcohol interlock installation facilitation and attention detection

- Emergency stop signal (aka autonomous braking)

- Intelligent speed assistance (aka adaptive cruise control)

- Lane keeping assist

- Reversing camera or detection system

All these systems require the car to be aware of its surroundings, i.e. require some "intelligence" in the control systems.

You’re right that those sort of rules require some kind of “smarts”.

None of them seem to require recording or log files.

It is true as of 2018: https://www.nhtsa.gov/equipment/driver-assistance-technologi...

Does NHTSA recommend rearview video systems? Yes. As of May 2018, NHTSA requires this lifesaving technology on all new vehicles. We recommend you look for RVSs that meet NHTSA’s performance specifications when shopping for a vehicle.

The actual requirement is a series of rear visibility tests that are done on a vehicle through the full range of seat adjustability.

A rear view camera allows any vehicle to meet the regulation regardless of vehicle styling and design. They are cheap, too.

But they are not strictly required. Your average 1980s sedan probably would meet the requirement as long as it had mirrors on the driver and passenger side.

Here is the regulation: https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/49/571.111

You're not wrong but in practice they're all but required because the corner that fuel economy and cabin strength requirements box you into is a corner with really high belt-lines and really poor visibility. You couldn't build something that's the shape of a 1990s sedan today.

In the US, it's absolutely true as of May 2018. https://www.nhtsa.gov/equipment/driver-assistance-technologi...

A backup camera does not make a car smart.

Absolutely insane. I wonder how much cheaper and better a modern car could be if I didn't have to pay for legally-mandated safety features that A) are probably not utilitarian B) I don't even use.

For example, I am 100% certain that the benefit of having an airbag between my legs does not outweigh the monetary cost plus the comfort cost of not having an AC vent under the steering wheel.

I understand the sentiment. However, are you saying that you think AC between your legs is a worthwhile feature but airbags are not?

>are you saying that you think AC between your legs is a worthwhile feature but airbags are not?

Why should people not be allowed to make that choice?

Keep in mind that the only reason we have airbags is because Naderites did not believe that one could rely on people using seatbelts so there needed to be technology that did not require cooperation from humans.

Fast-forward a couple of decades. Oooops. Airbags have no use without seatbelts and provide only a small amount of additional protection in most cases (thanks to crumple zones and improvements in shaping the interior of the car).

Crumple zones themselves aren't really that big of a win either. They basically just buy time to set an airbag off unless you just so happen to crash into something approximately like what the crash tests use at whatever speed the relevant crash test is at. A little blow that speed it will be too stiff to do much. A little above that speed the car will blow right through it like it's not even there.

The real benefit is in rigid passenger cabins that keep tires and engines out of the occupants legs.

IMO side curtain airbags are a far better safety improvement than frontal airbags because the safety technology in the sideways direction and space for dissipating force is lacking so something needs to pick up the slack.

Well, safety features also benefit the people who ride in your car with you, and those people weren't necessarily involved in your purchasing decision.

There's a happy medium somewhere. In an ideal world, we would regulate what is really important and ignore what isn't, but we're still figuring things out.

Personally, I like the idea of universal sunsets to deal with the difficulty of repealing old regulations. Codes could be reviewed on an N-year basis, with old rules requiring a cost/benefit analysis and 'yes' vote to renew. But in practice, those kinds of processes seem to end up with people rubber-stamping "last year++" revisions, like with the USA's defense re-authorization acts.

> Why should people not be allowed to make that choice?

Because in practice people don't make that choice. Manufacturers do.

Read up on de-gloving. Then remember to keep your hands away from the top of the wheel.