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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2 thoughts on “They don’t build ’em like they used to…and thank God for that”

  1. I have to say that is pretty amazing! After being involved in such a terrible front end crash I am much more thankful for our technologies than I ever thought I would be. You don’t realize how “safe” our cars are now until you walk away frrm a totaled Yuxon XL without anything broken. Kudos to GM. Papaw would be proud 🙂

    Reply
  2. Scary to see the damage at just 40 mph. Imagine 70. My parents drove us all over the country in a ’65 Fairlane until they bought a Buick LaSabre. There were no seatbelts in the Fairlane and we didn’t use the ones in the LaSabre.

    As a side note, staging those accidents be the funnest job ever.

    Reply

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