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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]."
Just look at the near fanatical destruction of the blueprints and prototypes of the canadian supersonic Avro Arrow combat jet back in the 50's. This car design getting buried is clearly another case of someone not wanting anyone to manufacture a competing model that could shake the current makers out of their lowest common denominator complacency.
RTFA - they used a Honda 4 cylinder engine. It probably took 3 minutes to get up to 55mph. And no word on how expensive they would have been to build. I'm guessing that there are a plethora of reasons why they were never built. Remeber, Ford tried to sell a safe car back in the 60s. It didn't sell, but not because people didn't want safe cars, but because it was a really crappy car. As usual, Detroit learned the wrong lesson from that experiance.
I think you might be surprised if you look into what the economy commuter cars from the 70s and 80s actually got.
They were lighter, and had smaller/less powerful engines.
"30mpg!" has been about the average for good mileage for a long time now. Every time we hit a new development in engine technology that'll give us a more effecient engine, we either use it to make more horsepower with the same given displacement, or the government mandates some other safety/emissions technology that pulls us right back down again.
I'm not saying that we (well, the auto industry) can't do better. Of course they can. Europe has turbodeisel deathboxes that get 70+ mpg. I'm saying that we, as americans, don't WANT better gas mileage. We want the huge rwd musclecar with the 7liter V8, or the tricked out awd import pushing 21psi through what might otherwise be an effecient 4banger.
Note, My father did own one of those "8mpg" 70s cars. It was a 71 challenger with a built 440 with a radical cam and solid lifters in it. it had about 500hp BEFORE the 300hp nitrous shot, and it had 4.90 gears in back. If you know anything about cars, you know that the above is about as bad a reciepe you can have for gas mileage short of towing a boat behind it (which he also did. my dad was a crazy guy), and it took all that to get down to 8mpg.
When you elect people that axiomatically believe that government can't do anything right, you get people that intentionally do government badly. Whether it's automobile safety, maintaining an a healthy and stable economy, or maintaining worker and environmental safety standards.
You wouldn't hire a janitor that said he was morally opposed to cleanliness and didn't believe that brooms worked. Why would you be shocked when everything goes to hell when you hire someone that says they don't believe government?
If government develops things, then it is tax payer money.
If what was developed gets distroyed, or hidden for no apparent reason, other than lobby or corporate pressure than that is TREASON.
TREASON is punishable by death...
Since one can not become politician on "competence" only, but on slimyness mostly, one has to accept he fact that the governors are not thinking like sane and technical minded people do... We have to accept this, and then find ways to live with it by regulating it :-) (i love that word)
To regulate this, I propose the introduction of death penalty for incompetence at political missions and corruption...
Really, if you want all this stuff, you can go buy a Passat, or an Accord with a bit lower mileage. That rig from the 70's wouldn't pass emissions tests today, so it would have to get heavier and the mileage would go down. A 70's Honda engine isn't exactly what people are looking for when they need to get on an Interstate, so you couldn't sell them easily either. Giant bumpers are nice until you need to parallel park in Chinatown.
I totally want a Delorean, emotionally, but I'm not actually going to buy one for daily driving - I was in a roll-over accident once; side-opening doors are nice.
Really, though, somebody should FOIA the plans and build a factory and see what happens, any patents have expired. Prove that Reagan's goons were wrong...
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Those who have watched the movie "Who killed the Electric Car" know that industry and politics will conspire to do what's profitable, not what's good policy. It is disheartening to hear that, once again, politicians supported by industry killed an effort to do what's good for the public interest.
Best regards.
Many of those improvements have been spent on dragging around safety systems, rather than discarded for better fuel economy.
This is true, and both the rate of vehicle deaths and number of deaths per year has been declining for 20 years.
So how do you translate "unimpressive performance" into "less safe"?
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.
This is why libertarian movements may be the nail in the coffin of the United States. The more a society refuses to pool easily shared resources, the more costs go up for individuals subjected to each other's externalities, and the more efficiency goes down for the society as a whole. If China can turn one gallon of fuel into a few hundred miles of transport per person, and we can only turn one gallon of fuel into twenty miles per person, guess who wins.
Everybody knows it. It's been scientifically, irrefutably proven...
[citation needed]
I live ze unknown. I love ze unknown. I am ze unknown.
I've heard of threads getting Godwin'd..... but this one had it in the summary.
Doesn't that, by itself, mean that no further replies are necessary?
by the continuing use and misuse of something a lawyer said in a Usenet post, what, 20 years ago?
A single invocation of a Nazi comparison, in the original post/article no less, is NOT running afoul of the Magic Pixie Dust of the Godwin Line. And it isn't even a comparison to Nazism in general, just an analogy to one particular thing that they did; rewriting history by obfuscating the truth. Some bad things that people do today *gasp* realy can be as bad as some bad things done by Hitler's government; not every comparison is an automatic beeline to the Holocaust.
Get over yourselves and these witty "OMG GODWIN!" bon mots.
32 would have milled heads, and dual exhaust that got 19 on the highway (when I didn't have my foot in it -- that was a FAST car). And it was a big car. Smaller cars regularly got up to 25.
However, the safety features weren't there. No air bags, no ABS, no crumple zones (much like modern SUVs), not even padded dashes. Cars from that era were death traps, even worse than today's SUVs.
The SUV was a giant step backwards.
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Let's assume a collision:
VW lupo
-vs-
the lady in the ford expedition that she bought so she could feel "safe" on the road
=
healthy dent on the expedition and horrible crushed doom to the lupo.
Have you seen american highways lately? people who can't drive their way out of a paper bag are routinely crusing around in 3 ton tanks, and you have to be in another 3 ton tank to survive the impact with them.
Ah, the 'SUVs are safer' myth.
Did you know that since SUVs are so much more likely to roll over, you actually lose all the safety benefit and are actually in more danger? It takes two cars to collide, it only takes one SUV to roll over.
Also, they have pretty stringent crash safety standards in Europe where gas is so expensive ($7/gallon last time I checked) that nobody but wealthy egotists can afford to drive gas-guzzling oversized vehicles that are too big for European city streets anyway. (Does Ford even sell the Expedition in Europe?) Get into a collision in Europe and it's more likely to be with another small car.
So the description of European cars as 'deathboxes' is a load of nonsense.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
A pure EV using even (relatively) cheap batteries today can suffice for your day to day commuter, recharging at night at home. For long trips trips, there is this concept, the range extending generator trailer.
If you need to do that sort of hundreds a mile a day driving, no, EVs are not for you. Under one hundred miles a day, which hits like 90% of most folk's driving, the tech is here now and a number of places have after market kits to convert cars and light trucks. Run you around 20 grand or so plus the donor vehicle you get used, then you decide what flavor of batteries you want to invest in first. Kits for like a ford ranger or chevy s-10 or some sedan, all sorts have been made so far. And you can put together your own generator trailer for that trip to see the relatives, etc., just stop and fillerup like normal at any gas station.
Waiting for the three hundred mile range on batteries and five minute recharge option, that I see people saying all the time, means they really aren't interested in them unless they are a millionaire or close to it and can get like a tesla or something with their toy budget, and you still won't get a five minute recharge.
But, 50 -100 mile range and falling into the normal joe sixpack range of cost for a new midrange normal vehicle, you can do it now. You can't do it brand new from some dealer, it will be years and years before they get that cheap, but you *can* do it with the kits.
http://www.google.com/search?electric+conversion+kits
Prototypes always cost more than mass market production runs.
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It's just good common sense. Everybody knows it. It's been scientifically, irrefutably proven, so anybody who tells you differently has an agenda: there is no such thing as a government ever producing anything better than private industry, and the sooner we learn that, the sooner we'll be free of all the problems we've got here in modern socialist America -- and particularly free to ignore or simply be amused by obvious fictions like this article.
Here's the first best thing you should know about a private corporation:
A private corporation is not in any way interested in providing you with a good, cheap, modern product. If they could charge you exorbitant prices for a product with poor quality and old technology, slowly pacing it out to generate constant new purchases and maximize their profits they would. The only reason they improve is if they are exposed to competition, and only if there is no cheaper way to block it using market barriers, regulatory barriers, lock-in, price dumping and a host of other dirty tactics. If there is no anti-trust with teeth, if there are no government regulations all you get are extremely exploitative private monopolies, which are far worse than the government. You do realize that the US is the country with the most liberal rules and has been hit the hardest by the financial crisis right?
modern socialist America
Guess not. Guess you want it to hurt even more.
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The parent was modded a troll because the comment is a troll.
The car didn't die "due to libertarians". The car died because it cost too much, drove too slow, and was determined by apparently every car manufacturer in the world to be roughly the equivalent of the Nissan Shitbox.
What has happened is that as manufacturers have found ways to squeeze more power out of their engines, some of that power has been siphoned off to haul around the kinds of safety features this car had. A lot of these kinds of features went into the high-end, super expensive cars much earlier than mainstream vehicles because when you add $3,000 to a $70,000 car, it stings a lot less than when you add it to a $9,000 car. When the cost of safety feature X went from the $3k cost at inception to a mature product's cost of $300, it found its way into that $9,000 car.
The only conspiracy here is the conspiracy of consumers who want bigger, faster, and more powerful 90% of the time. When times are tough, some of them start to value efficiency. When you look at most of the market (especially the market 20 and 30 years ago), safety doesn't generally rank very high. It's more of an "oh look, it even got 4 stars on some safety thing, that's cool too!". People seem to forget that Toyota only managed to get the Prius R&D'd with the huge profits coming from their trucks. They correctly realized that fuel efficiency actually does pop up on the radar every so often and so they didn't sink every dime they had into making bigger and more badass looking trucks like certain other manufacturers. And even then, if Toyota had been pushing the 2010 Prius in 1980 or 1990 instead of the vehicles they had at the time, they'd be just another footnote in the history of failed vehicle manufacturers.
Each kind of car has its own time and this car was a solid 30 years too early. It does nobody any good if nobody can mass produce it without going bankrupt. It's easy to look back now and say "you people were stupid for not buying them like crazy", but people in 2030 will be looking back at us saying the same thing about something we, today, consider ridiculous.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
It makes sense when you realize that the "clean" janitor screams at you for an hour if you miss the waste basket and introduces a charge to use the bathroom to keep people from making a mess. Oh, and somehow the place doesn't really look any cleaner...
Beyond the basic "what makes you think people who want to run everything will therefore be good at it" question, you big government types need to remember that no matter what you do, the giant rambling apparatus you create *will* later be driven by someone who completely disagrees with you. The benevolent dictator idea only really works when you've got a perfect system for choosing dictators.
No, I'm assuming that will be enormously expensive when all pieces of equipment used to transport and construct new infrastructure use oil as their primary fuel source, and that for every calorie of food consumed in the US, 3500 calories of petroleum are expended to produce, harvest, transport, and process it. In 1970 the ratio was 1 to 1.
That, and the fact that the average American lives tens of miles away from their workplace, and has no way to get there without using a highway. Just project in your head what Sean Hannity would say if, to pull through such a shortage, we needed to legalize bicycles on interstates and put quotas on oil usage to preserve them to build rail stations and non-motorized vehicle lanes. He'd try to get everyone in line to invade Venezuela, which of course will only put off the inevitable and entrench our dependence on foreign resources.
MIRRAR - when you look up at the rear-view MIRRAR and there's a high-pitched noise coming from your mouth, the vehicle in the rear-view MIRRAR is likely to rear-end you.
How's the libertarian response to the oil disaster going? Had to have the government step in did we?
Europe was hit less hard by the crash than the US, but don't let facts get in the way of your dogma. Idiot.
Or by vastly more efficient freight rail services and electric vans with enough range to cover the the majority of Americans who live near urban areas. Last I checked, 70% of the population lived in 3% of the same land mass.
Performance (acceleration) on a low end to mid range car is near the same - or not too far off to make it undriveable... the VW Dasher did 12 seconds 0-60, or 19 with the diesel engine. Not bad for almost FIFTY mpg.
I'd be happy with a bit better performance, and say... 35-45mpg (instead of 40-57mpg) highway... but the car companies seem to have forgotten how to do that...
VW haven't forgotten. I have a ten yr old golf that gets 60+mpg (UK = 50+ US mpg) highway mileage (in real life, tank to tank on long trips) and does 0-60 in about 12s. Looking at the new ones today, I could get 60+ mpg(US), 9.3secs 0-60 and more than 30% extra HP.
The problem is that if you are in the US, you probably can't buy these cars. Someone a few years ago decided that americans didn't want to buy them, so they aren't designed for US regs (or US regs are designed to exclude them in favour of Hummers, depending on who you believe).
The engineers haven't forgotten how to build what you want (if you are in the US) - marketing (and politics) told them you didn't want it.