rev up your engines, today I'm going to be talking about the most
dangerous car to be driving in America today and about car safety in general,
and the winner is, drum roll please, or should I say the loser,
the 2006 Kia Spectra, danger in terms of vehicle deaths in the US
goes by a system that's called deaths per million registered vehicle miles,
and the Kia is at the top of the list, the 2006 Kia Spectra because it's got 191 deaths
in the system, now to compare that to my wife's 2002 Lexus
ES300, this only has 12 deaths per million registered
vehicles, so this thing is like 16 times safer than
the Kia is, statistically you're 16 times less likely
to die in this Lexus than you are in the Kia, and that is kind of interesting because this
Lexus is way faster than the Kia, you would think people would be going super fast and
get killed in high speed wrecks, where the Kia can't go that fast, but no that's not
the case, now the Nissan 350Z does have a high rate,
they're 143 deaths per million registered vehicle miles, but hey it's a sports car,
people drive them fast, the vehicle itself is relatively well made
but when you're driving like maniacs, especially younger male drivers, there's going to be
more people killed just because of the nature of the beast,
but it's still below that of the Kia Spectra, now of course some of this has to do with
the size of vehicle, that's kind of obvious, for example you're about 100 times more likely
to die in a tiny Chevy than you are in a Toyota Sienna minivan,
that just makes sense, so size has a lot to do with it, and here's a little history of
seat restraint systems to explain why, now when I was a young mechanic in the 1960's
there were a lot of 1950's cars still rolling around, they didn't even have seat belts in
them, it was an option for some and some didn't even have the ability to have them,
you'd have to put them in yourself, then they came out with simple lap belts,
like in an airplane, where is just buckles over your waist, and
that of course kept people from flying out of the windshields and being thrown out of
the car, hey in the 1950's and earlier, you get in a big wreck you would actually fly
right through the windshield, one of my father's customers was a black and
white photographer for accidents and he had these picture of people in the 1950's with
their heads cut off and flying through the windshields, I mean it was some pretty gruesome
stuff, the seat belts were a radical change that was needed for the car driving public,
and in 1959, Volvo was the first company to use mass produced 3 point seat belts like
some of the modern systems are, it was actually an American patent in 1955,
but the Swedish were the first ones to produce it because I guess Americans has this thing
that they don't like being restrained in their car, they want to still pretend they're on
their couch in the living room watching TV instead of driving, my old Celica has that
system, it goes over your lap and your shoulder and it's actually a pretty good system as
long as you use it, but still many Americans they wanted to feel
they were on the living room couch and they wouldn't use the things,
so they came up with the idea of airbags, airbags are passive, they're not active at
all, all you have to do is sit in the car, the airbag is build into here, and there's
another one built into here, and many modern cars have side airbag, curtain airbags, airbags
all over the place, airbags work by themselves, there's sensors
on the car, you get in a wreck, there's an actual explosive device, the airbag explodes
and this bag absorbs all your energy of going forwards or going sideways if there's airbags
on the sides, and they do work great, but they got one problem,
they inflate really fast in microseconds they hold you in and then they deflate, so they
only work one time, let's say you're in a small car and you get
hit, the airbags deploy great, but what happens if you then roll over, another car hit you,
or you fly over a bridge or something, there not going to work like a seat belt that's
a permanent thing holding you in place, plus you're believing that this complex computer
driven system is going to sit there for maybe 10-12 years and then all the sudden the one
time it's needed, it's going to activate correctly, I've had customers in Chrysler vans be driving
down the road when their older, hit a bump and the airbags went off in their face and
they almost got in a wreck because of the airbags,
and I've also had customers that have been in cars that they got in a wreck and the airbags
just didn't deploy, not conventional 3 point seat belts, hey they click in place,
pretty simple latch, if you use them they are a great safety device,
but even with them, size does matter in a car, this Lexus is a pretty big car,
get in a Kia Spectra or maybe even worse for size, a Smart car and you'll see there's not
that much space between you and the car and if you get hit by a big 18 wheeler or a big
Ford F-150 truck the odds are you're not going to do too good inside those, even though they
claim that they have structure that's going to save you,
there just isn't enough structure, now modern cars are designed with crumple
zones so when you get in a wreck, instead of you getting crushed,
the energy is absorbed by the car crumpling itself in, but when you got a tiny little
car, there's only so much to crumple, a bigger car has a lot of crumple space before
it's going to get to you, and modern collision avoidance systems that
they have in the newer cars, yeah they work to some extent to help you from hitting things
if you don't see somebody and not run into them,
but hey if somebody is coming into you from the front or the side it's not going to save
you, only size and good seat belts are going to save you in that case,
so now you know what the most dangerous car to drive in America day is and how to avoid
becoming one of it's victims, so if you never want to miss another one of
my new car repair videos, remember to ring that bell!