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Sorry I didn't save which thread it was on, but someone stated that the cars out there weigh a ton. I wished they weighed a ton! They actually on average, weigh two tons.
Modern cars in general are all over-engineered pieces of shit.
Instead of keeping designs simple and low-maintenance, bells and fucking whistles have to be thrown onto every motorized piece of machinery.
Yeah, all in the name of safety and preserving life.
I'd still much rather just have seatbelts and cross my fingers.
When my truck rolled 2 years ago, it was the seatbelt that saved my ass.
As far as making vehicles safer, more and more shit gets thrown onto them to make the vehicle less funner.
For instance, those old Jeeps that all branches of the military were using before switching to the HMMWV(real Hummer, not the emasculated pieces of suburban dick-waving). Those things were top heavy, light, easy to roll, but some of the coolest vehicles to drive as far as I thought.
I once thought about getting one for off-roading and starting hawking the idea at a local joint for offroaders.
Lets just say an actual shoving match occurred after I mentioned how safety equipment like roll cages, deep-suspension, and wide body'ing made their fleet of rebuilt Jeeps seem effeminate.
I dunno, keep it simple, keep the adrenaline pumping?
And if they can throw booster rockets onto an MC-130, then I want one of these to cover the distance between Victimville, and the Rancho Cucamonga Metro station.
Just stash the unit and the fuel tanks some place until the return trip.
While it is true that the modern car is far safer than ever, there is also evidence to show that as cars get safer, people drive more dangerously. The death and injury rates have not gone down as much as they should have.
This was just one of the gems I gleaned from reading Tom Vanderbilt's book "Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do". While it's primarily a book about driving, it has many insights into the conditions we all face as cyclists. And let's face it, most of us drive cars on occasion, too.
That Bel Air was a four door, wasn't very desirable.
Cars can be lite weight and safe, Europe has had them for years. The problem is that our gas prices are cheap, and the government doesn't regulate the size of cars. In Europe they tax cars by the engine displacement. The higher the displacement, the higher the tax. Then they have gas at $6-10 a gallon.
I would much prefer if small cars were the norm here. We'd have more room on the road, and people just might drive slower. I doubt it, cause when I drove my small car, there was alot of room to forgive for driving errors. In other words, the lanes were wide and I could go balls out and not end up on the side of the road. The only thing that slowed me down was a desire to achieve 40 mpg each tankful.
User1 responding to a comment by JB
10.23.09 - 12:29 pm
Only fashionable thing about the BelAir was the fact that any old cars are simple and easy enough for anyone to repair.
These smaller cars are cool and everything, but when they break down, prepare to get your hands sliced up and your joints ready for some contortionist practice.
Only small car that seems to get good mileage and is easy to work on to me is the old school Beetle.
The engine/transaxle are mounted in an easily accessible, rear compartment.
The law of diminishing returns at work.
Cars are safer, therefore people drive them faster and more recklessly. Not to mention that this in turn puts pedestrians and cyclists at even more risk from the reckless driving.
Also Cars don't really need to have 200, 300+ horsepower do they?
...it's nice to have this as validation. Just a few days ago, I burst out laughing in my physics class when the professor suggested a car might have a mass of 200 kg for a theoretical problem.
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Sorry I didn't save which thread it was on, but someone stated that the cars out there weigh a ton. I wished they weighed a ton! They actually on average, weigh two tons.
Shameless...