How deadly is your car?
Perhaps your current vehicle isn't the safe and secure ride you think it is and instead,
it's a potential accident waiting to happen.
Unfortunately, some cars are deadlier than others, and you could be driving in one of
these rolling coffins without even knowing it.
In the '80s, the Yugo GV was inexplicably popular despite being like the ugliest car
anywhere.
Perhaps it was the entry price of just below $4,000, or perhaps it was the fact that it
was manufactured in Soviet-bloc Yugoslavia during the Cold War.
That probably gave it an air of danger, which is ironic as it actually was dangerous.
The car was cheap both in price and in design, and it goes to show that sometimes, you get
what you pay for.
"Listen to this.
There you go, that’s the same sort of dull, aristocratic ‘whump.’”
It was so light that LA Magazine says a 55 mph gust of wind once blew one over the edge
of a bridge in Michigan, killing its driver.
It was also slow, reaching 60 mph in about 14 seconds, and it did poorly in crash tests,
which is not surprising for a car that was so light it could literally blow away.
The handling was pretty bad, too.
After test-driving an old Yugo, writer Doug DeMuro said this:
"A car with a nice, comfortable ride usually has vague, disappointing handling; a car with
a harsh ride usually has quick, sporty steering.
But somehow, the Yugo's creators blessed it with both a harsh, jarring ride and poor steering
and handling."
And it was super ugly, so the Yugo just all around had nothing going for it.
While cars in general usually won't explode even while careening down a cliff, some are
so poorly designed that catching on fire occasionally was almost a normal operating function.
The Pontiac Fiero was one such car.
According to Car Buzz, the Fiero inherited an older engine that had to be slightly redesigned
to make it fit, but engineers failed to also redesign the dipstick.
As a consequence of the oversight, Fiero owners were fooled into thinking oil levels were
a-okay when they were actually about a quart low.
So that was not great, but up to 40 percent of all Fieros also had defective connecting
rods, and those two problems combined would often cause engine fires.
That was bad, and it wasn't the only potentially flammable problem.
There was also a wiring harness just above the exhaust manifold that would occasionally
melt and then burst into flames, and loose head bolts could also crack and start fires.
Fiero engine fires weren't just an occasional thing, either.
By 1987, around 20 Fieros were catching fire every single month.
And even though no one died and it was really just the 1984 model that had these problems,
consumers started to become understandably wary about buying Fieros, so GM ended production
in 1988.
Popular Mechanics called this '70s-era car
"the best example of what happens when poor engineering meets corporate negligence."
Problems started because not only was the Pinto designed to be light and cheap, it was
also pushed to market really quickly, with a delivery deadline of just over two years.
But before this car even reached the dealerships, developers learned it was a death trap.
It didn't take an especially high-speed collision to damage the gas tank filler neck, spilling
fuel under the car, and the tank was also vulnerable to becoming punctured by all the
myriad bolts that surrounded it.
Engineers suggested a redesigned tank, or a shield that could protect the tank in a
collision, all fixes would have cost around $11 per vehicle.
But here's the really villainous part of the story: Ford figured out it would actually
be cheaper to be sued for the accidents that did happen, rather than fix all the cars.
They sat down and ran the numbers: $113 million to make the tank safer, $49 million in death
and dismemberment lawsuits.
So Ford released the Pinto, and people started dying, just as predicted.
The official numbers show 27 recorded deaths due to explosive fires, but the number grew
twice as large when the car's terrible transmission problems were included.
It's not a huge number given that there were 2.2 million Pintos on the road at one time,
but still, most people are of the opinion that one preventable death is too many.
The Environmental Working Group once joked that SUV stands for "Suddenly Upside-down
Vehicle," which would have been amusing if there weren't so many dead people in all those
rolled-over SUVs.
The Bronco II, which came out in 1983, was one of the worst offenders.
It was designed to be a smaller and lighter version of the Bronco, which sounds great
in principle but was kind of not great when it came to the part where people had to actually
drive it in real-world situations.
The Bronco II, as it turned out, had a tendency to roll over even at pretty modest speeds,
and there's evidence that Ford knew about this as early as 1981.
In fact, they were so informed about the problem that they actually canceled their own safety
tests because they were concerned for the safety of the test drivers.
That concern did not extend to actual consumers, though, and hundreds of people were killed
between 1983 and 2001 when Bronco IIs and Ford Explorers were involved in rollover accidents.
Ford engineers suggested widening the vehicle track by 3 or 4 inches to improve stability,
but Ford decided to face the lawsuits instead, because the Pinto evidently taught them nothing.
You might think we live in a scary time, from an automotive perspective, but just try to
put yourself back in the early 1900s, when everyone was discovering the joys of car ownership
and there were no stop signs.
By the 1920s, more than half the cars on the road were Model Ts, which featured a gas tank
located under the seat and windshields made out of flat glass that would eviscerate you
if you happened to run into another Model T… or anything else.
Also, driving a Model T was beyond complicated.
There was a lever for the throttle, a lever for something called the spark advance, and
three pedals for the clutch, the brake, and changing gears.
Oh, and then you had to steer, and no one wants their first car to be that complicated.
That was all if you managed to get the thing started without breaking your arm on the kickback
from the hand crank.
Those things were no joke, and it was the death of a good Samaritan who had his jaw
broken by a hand crank on a Cadillac that inspired the switch to electric motors.
Also, there were no real road rules, no driving schools, no seatbelt laws, and of course,
no seatbelts.
In 1917, there were more than 7,000 car accidents in the city of Detroit alone, and shockingly,
that was two years after the stop sign first appeared on a Detroit street.
Ralph Nader famously described the Chevy Corvair as a "one-car accident."
In his 1965 book Unsafe at Any Speed, Nader turned the car into a scapegoat for every
flawed car that has ever existed, so it's tempting to say that the Corvair really wasn't
that bad, except that it still was pretty bad.
According to Road and Track, the early model Corvair featured a weirdly-designed suspension
that gave the wheels a dramatic tilt, so if the driver tried to turn quickly, the car
would fishtail.
The Corvair could also roll over, which happened infrequently but was still a dangerous possibility.
By the time Nader's book was released, the Corvair had been redesigned to address the
flaws that had made it the subject of more than 100 lawsuits.
So it was no longer super dangerous, but that didn't stop GM from responding to the negative
press in the most obnoxious way ever.
Perhaps they felt the only thing they could do to fight back was tap Ralph Nader's phone
and scandalize him by having prostitutes attempt to seduce him while he was grocery shopping.
And they also kept the Corvair around for a lot longer than they probably otherwise
would have, just so no one could accuse them of admitting that Nader had a point.
Modern cars are, on the whole, a lot safer than early cars were.
Airbags and seatbelts are standard now, and at some point the powers that be learned that
stop signs and speed limits were pretty good ideas.
"I put two extra stop signs, now there’s four stop signs so no cars can go!”
But some modern cars are considerably more dangerous than others, and a relatively modern
example of a car that's really not very safe is the 2009 to 2011 Toyota Yaris.
The first strike against these cars is their size.
In 2012, the Los Angeles Times said people traveling in the tiny, subcompact Yarises
were a lot more likely to be injured in a crash than passengers of other cars.
The stats were ugly, too.
For every 1,000 insured Toyota Yarises of these years, personal injury claims were filed
28.5 times.
That data did appear to be in conflict with the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety,
who named the Yaris one of their "top safety picks" in 2012.
Those ratings are based mostly on crash tests, though, and Highway Loss Data Institute senior
vice president Kim Hazelbaker put it this way:
"Injury claims data show something that crash test results can't, and that's the role that
vehicle size plays."
In other words, if you're looking for a safe vehicle, maybe avoid very small models.
When you pay upwards of $225,000 for a car, you have a number of expectations.
One, it should look like something you spent an insane amount of money on.
Two, it should mostly not ever burst into flames.
Those are fairly minor expectations, aren't they?
You'd think, but according to the Guardian, in 2010 Ferrari recalled the 458 Italia because
it had a bad habit of bursting into flames.
The trouble first came to light in Paris when an Italia caught fire and had to be put out
by a good Samaritan with a fire extinguisher.
Then one caught fire in the Swiss Alps, and another one in China, and another in the U.S.
When engineers looked into the problem, they discovered they'd used a flammable adhesive
in the wheel arch.
Oops.
That's also not the only problem with the Italia, there's also the fact that the people
who drive them, crash them.
A lot.
A website called Wrecked Exotics reported six Italia crashes in a span of just 90 days,
which is pretty stunning when you consider how few of these things are actually on the
road.
The Smart Car is so small it makes the Toyota Yaris look like a Hummer, so it's no surprise
Oregon Live called it "jarringly stupid on safety," which come on, is anyone really that
surprised?
Really?
In 2009, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety tested the Smart ForTwo against a midsized
C-Class Mercedes Benz.
There's probably no need to describe what happened to the Smart ForTwo, but it is something
akin to a soda can in a trash compactor.
An airborne trash compactor.
The president of the institute, Adrian Lund, put it this way when talking to The Wall Street
Journal:
"I think everyone knows you don't send a flyweight into the ring against a heavyweight, but in
this case the larger cars aren't heavyweights."
The Smart Car was originally designed for fuel economy, and it did get awesome gas mileage
- about 40 miles per gallon.
It was notoriously inexpensive, too, though consumers did have to weigh all of that against,
you know, dying.
Today you can get an electric version of the Smart Car, though one must really ask, why?
The whole reason for having a stupidly tiny car was fuel economy, but if you're going
to be all electric anyway, you maybe just want to get a car that's not nicknamed "the
organ donor."
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