When the US Government Built Ultra-Safe Cars

Jalopnik has a piece on a mostly forgotten piece of automotive history: the US government built a fleet of ultra-safe cars in the 1970s. The "RSV" cars were designed to keep four passengers safe in a front or side collision at 50 mph (80 kph) — without seat belts — and they got 32 miles to the gallon. They had front and side airbags, anti-lock brakes, and gull-wing doors. Lorne Greene was hired to flack for the program. All this was quickly dismantled in the Reagan years, and in 1990 the mothballed cars were all destroyed, though two prototypes survived in private hands. "Then-NHTSA chief Jerry Curry [in 1990] contended the vehicles were obsolete, and that anyone who could have learned something from them had done so by then. Claybrook, the NHTSA chief who'd overseen the RSV cars through 1980, told Congress the destruction compared to the Nazis burning books. ... 'I thought they were intentionally destroying the evidence that you could do much better,' said [the manager of one of the vehicles' manufacturers]."

Comments

Government can do no right...when run by GOP

[JimmytheGeek]

Seriously, wtf?

Re:30MPG was not uncommon

[Loki_1929]

Because if everyone drove a small and light car with a smaller, more fuel efficient engine, we would have less fatalities and much less fuel consumption nationwide. We could also save an immense amount of money on replacing infrastructure, since hauling around 4,000 lb SUVs to get a single person from one place to another has more externalities than just the waste of metal and oil resources. Not to mention the increased danger to other, smaller vehicles.

Damn, if only the government could force everyone to buy the same kind of government-approved car, wouldn't that be great? Better yet, maybe it could just construct all housing in a handfull of mega-cities to achieve economies of scale and ban cars outright in favor of mass transportation. Well, except for cops of course. But you know what else would save a lot of time, effort, and money via efficiency? If the cops could just judge law-breakers on the spot. And we could just call them judges for short. And as long as nobody unlocks the files for the Janus Project, everything will just be groovy.