They don’t build ’em like they used to…and thank God for that

As a demonstration of how much vehicle crash safety has improved over the past 50 years, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety recently pitted a 1959 Chevrolet Bel Air and a 2009 Chevrolet Malibu against one another in the standard 40-mph frontal offset crash test (hat tip, Dad).

Wow.

There is a lot to be said about proper roles of government and industry, corruption, cost, and so forth when it comes to vehicle safety, and almost none of it is cut-and-dried to a thinking person.

But I’m not getting into that in this post.  Whether or not you or I think we’d have gotten where we are by different paths, we’re here now, and from the driver’s seat, now is clearly better than then.

Man, too bad for that ’59 Chevy.  It looked like a pretty car.  At least they didn’t use an Impala.

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