Thank goodness "they don't build them like they used to"....listen and learn why

Hey folks, Lindy Lawson here and welcome back to another edition of My Car Guru.

This is an important discussion today.

I wish I could hear your feedback, but I can't, so it's kind of a one-way discussion.

But this is an important discussion for those of you out there who have made the comment,

well they don't build them like they used to. That is with regards to automobiles.

Now I would be one to say that, yeah, there's a certain truth in that when it comes to design.

But when it comes to just about anything else, when it comes to performance, when it comes to

reliability, and especially when it comes to safety, thank goodness they don't build them

like they used to. Now what prompted me to talk about this? Well, two things. One was an article

I read in automotive news, and the headline was Ford enters race to offer eyes off driving tech

starting with a $30,000 EV in 2028. That's not too far off. The other situation I guess that

that made me want to talk about this was a mother who reached out to me and wants to buy a vehicle

for her daughter who will be, well gets her driver's license in the not too distant future.

She wants to spend $12,000 and wants a small SUV. Now that's a pretty big hurdle.

It didn't used to be four or five years ago, well maybe longer than that, maybe 10 years ago.

That was an easy find, no problem. But it's tough now because of just the way used car values have

spiked. You know, and that's one reason that I can say that thank goodness they don't build

them like they used to, because you can sell a car to somebody that has 100 to 150,000 miles on it,

and it's still got plenty of life left in it if it was properly maintained. That was not true with

vehicles sold in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, especially in the 70s. When they hit 100,000 miles they were

about toast. But I want to dig into this in two ways. Number one, I'm not a big fan of the Ford

Motor Company saying that they're going to, you know, really push this eyes off driving tech.

Because I don't know how you feel about it, but I'm just not a big fan. It's definitely a generational

thing. I believe because I'm older and a baby boomer that I don't trust technology as much as

the Generation Z does. I mean, they're all about tech. And, you know, I use a lot of tech.

I'm using it right now to record this program. I just had tech in my hand just a minute ago,

my iPhone. I was using tech on my iPhone. I was using chat GPT. You can't get more techy than that.

And I'm a fan on some of the technology that's on our cars today. But am I going to really,

when I get on the interstate, after driving on a two lane road, finally I get on the interstate,

am I going to push a button and just lay my chair back or my seat back and take a nap? Or,

you know, put a magazine up a magazine, look at my cell phone or just whatever,

start having a conversation, just turn and completely do not pay attention to the road.

Are you going to do that? Some of you are saying, well, sure, I'll do it. You know,

as long as it's got the technology, they trust the technology. They trust the hardware and they

trust the software or AI, which is software. I'm not there. Too often does my computer lock up,

just freezes on an Apple. It's a little beach ball that shows up and starts spinning around.

Imagine that happening and you're, you know, well into a movie or something like that,

not paying attention and a car suddenly stops in front of you and you just plow right into it

because the cameras and the system, the hardware and the software fail. Now, do humans fail?

Of course we do. We stop paying attention. We get distracted. We can be looking right at the road

and not thinking about anything. Have you ever driven like, you know, feel like you've driven

a certain distance and you don't even realize it. You don't even remember anything that you

passed. That has happened to me before. It's just like my subconscious took over driving the car

and I was just not consciously aware of what was going on, but I was going around curves and

everything, but I can't remember anything that I did. Maybe that's just me. So humans fail. We

lose our focus, but a lot of the technology folks behind all of this say that, that the technology

will fail less often than we do. So I guess in total we'll all be safer if the computers take over.

That we won't need traffic lights at intersections because cars will be able to

receive signals from other vehicles from oncoming traffic or coming from the sides and they will

coordinate their stops and starts. And I'm sure that's coming. I mean, I've watched many episodes

of the Jetsons. You remember George, Jane, Judy. I can't remember the dog's name or the little boy's

name, but anyway, the Jetsons, yeah, they just floating around and they didn't have to drive.

You know, of course they were in space, but a little bit different. So I'm going to do a little

program about safety. I'm going to prove to you that the cars of the fifties, sixties and seventies,

while they look a lot heavier, well, they are heavier. The metal sounds different when you

close the hood or shut the door. It just sounds more solid and it is. And that's one of the reasons

why they failed so miserably to protect humans. What we see or what a lot of people see is their

greatest attribute is actually what caused so many people to die in those vehicles back then.

And so that mother that's looking for a vehicle for her 16 year old to start driving can rest easy

that pretty much anything you buy today will be safer. And I'm going to explain why.

Okay, I am back. So let's just compare apples and apples. So let's take away all of the accident

avoidance technology that we have on modern vehicles like blind spot monitoring, like cross

traffic alert, automatic braking, airbags and a lot breaks. Let's take all of that off.

And let's just compare the way the vehicles are built structurally and see why the cars

from the fifties, sixties and seventies aren't as safe as the cars that are being sold today.

Because if I'm a mama wanting to buy a vehicle for my 16 year old to drive,

then I can feel more comfortable letting them drive just about any modern car,

including a Hyundai or a Kia instead of letting them drive the 65 Mustang that their father or

grandfather drove or the Jeep. That's a big popular vehicle with a lot of young kids.

They want to drive dad's old Jeep. And of all people, I can understand and appreciate the

nostalgia thing. And my kids, they drove just about everything that I had that was old,

even the ones without seatbelts. And so we're surely they won't run into anything.

But if they did, that's pretty much on me. And I don't want to take that responsibility.

So what are the differences here? Well, cars from the fifties, sixties and seventies,

they were built like tanks. They had rigid frames. They had really thick steel.

The design philosophy basically then was if you're in an accident, don't bend much. Hold up

in an accident. But what this did was, you know, this energy has to go somewhere

and it ended up going into the occupants. There was nothing being absorbed. I'll explain more of

that here in just a minute. But some of the common features that these cars had, they weren't

unibody constructed vehicles for the most part. They were body on frame. So it had a

ladder type frame, which was very thick and strong. They had steel dashboards like this

57 Chevy out here. I look at that dashboard point things pretty. I mean, the paint on it

is just as shiny as the paint on the hood. But imagine your face getting planted on that.

And it's not so pretty solid steering columns aimed right at the driver's chest.

No collapsible steering columns like they have today. Very weak door structures.

There were no steel beams in the doors to protect from a side impact. No, they felt

like the metal in the door was enough and it wasn't. And plus they had minimal roof strength.

They didn't even think about that back then. So the outcome of that is that cars looked very

repairable. If they were in an accident, the occupants absorbed the deceleration that occurred

in the vehicle, either cramming them up against the dashboard or throwing them out of the car

altogether. So there were high rates of fatal chest head and internal injuries. So a 1960s car

surviving a crash visually often meant that the people in the car did not survive.

So what about today? Well, the design philosophy is built around control and absorb energy.

It's designed to sacrifice the car and to save the people. And the way they do that is with

crumple zones, front and rear, that means that the vehicle is designed to fold up like an accordion,

but do it at a controlled rate based on the speed of the deceleration of the car.

They have rigid safety cage built around the occupants. And that includes the roof of the car,

high strength steel, ultra high strength steel. Yes, those are two different classifications of

steel. The engine in front end collision is designed to drop underneath the cabin where the

people are and to absorb a lot of the energy from a frontal crash. And then the A, B and C pillars,

that's the pillar that basically goes from the windshield down. And then the B pillar goes from

the roof to the floor between the front seat passengers and the rear seat passengers. And

then the C pillar is the one back behind the rear seat passengers, supports the rear window and the

back of the roof in a passenger car. Now you can't have a D pillar, which is the farthest back like

an NSUV. So that's all I'm going to say about pillars. But also in a side impact collision,

these pillars form a very important function. They redirect the energy in a side impact.

Now you can still get killed with a major side impact, but not anything like it was back in the

those previous decades. Now the outcome as opposed to being a car that's repairable

is a totaled vehicle. That's just the way it is. Occupant deceleration is slower

and it is survivable. You know when a crash happens, it's all about physics.

Force equals mass times deceleration. And so what you're trying to do is minimize the force that

is imparted onto the passengers in the vehicle. So modern structures, modern cars increase crash

time by milliseconds. What does that mean? Well, if let's say you're driving a 1957 Chevy

and you hit a telephone pole, then the amount of time, the milliseconds that it takes for that

energy from that massive deceleration to get to the passenger is shorter because it's almost

instantaneous. Whereas if there are crumple zones and that car is crushing like a like an accordion,

then it takes a longer period of time for the energy to reach the passengers. And when it

does reach the passengers, it's less. There is less force being imposed on the body. This is why

a 35 mile per hour crash in a 1965 Chevrolet Impala could be fatal. And a modern car at the

same speed usually involves people just unbuckling their seatbelt and climbing out of the car saying,

I didn't see the stop sign. And then the excuses come. But they're alive. And that's the advantage

of the modern cars. Now we also need to talk about rollovers because that happens a lot. I saw one

happen not too long ago. Unbelievable. You know, and I've seen a lot of race cars crash. I go to

to the Petit Le Mans down at Road Atlanta and some some of the crashes that you see are just

unbelievable. And the driver just climbs right out, walks away. 1960s, 70 cars, roofs usually

collapsed completely in rollovers. And most of the cars didn't have seatbelts. I remember in the

early 60s, we started seeing some seatbelts. My dad would always install seatbelts. It was always

something you could do, you know, even back in the late 40s and 50s. And he knew how important

that was. And so he had seatbelts installed in the vehicles that he drove and the ones my mom drove.

Probably saved my dad when he was in a really bad accident one time. He totaled a road grader.

And the only thing that was interesting to me about that is that when he got out of the vehicle,

the soles of his shoes were ripped off, both feet. They were still tied to his feet,

but the soles were missing. I said, dad, I don't understand how that happened. He said,

I don't either, but I survived. I walked away on my bare feet. Now on modern cars, the roofs

are required. Do you say roof or roof? I'm going to say roof. They were required to support three

to four times the vehicle weight. And survival space has to be preserved in the vehicle at the

same time. So in the case of a rollover, even in a regular everyday passenger car, not some race

car with a roll cage in it, just the car you're driving now, it has to be able to sustain that

type of a rollover. So I briefly mentioned side impact. Let's see what the difference is there.

It's pretty much night and day. Older cars had very thin doors, had no real side impact

load paths, in other words, for the energy to be absorbed and to bypass the passengers.

And the result was that a T bone crash was more often than not catastrophic. Now modern cars

do have door beams. I remember when Chevrolet first came out with a bunch of ads and they would say

it's got side guard door beams or side door guard beams. One of those two. But if you were to take

off the inner door panel on your vehicle, you're going to see more metal, but behind that metal is

a beam. Now when I say a beam, it's not like one of these big structural beams that you see

underneath a bridge or even like in a commercial building. It's not like that. It's much thinner,

but it's shaped in a way and bent in a way to make it absorb a lot of energy if it's hit from

the outside. It's thicker than the metal on the outside of the door, way thicker than that.

And it's just designed to absorb some of that impact. Now, of course, we have side impact

airbags now, but even just looking structural integrity of one vehicle to another, there's

there is no comparison. My 16 year old daughter had an accident right after she got her driver's

license. She was driving home from school. I was actually in Atlanta. I'm merging into traffic,

headed home from the auto auction, and I get this phone call and I answer it.

And I get this kind of phone call. She's all right, Lenny. So I'm going to say that first.

So gosh, what? Audrey was in a wreck. What happened? She was driving home from school

and she was on that road right behind our house and she's not really sure what happened. She was,

all of a sudden, started spinning around and took out a fence row and a few trees and she's

okay, though. I can't say that for the car. I said, okay, well, I'm glad she's okay. Obviously,

I will check things out when I get back and you know, how do you respond to something like that?

I just said a quick prayer and kept driving home. Well, I got to see the car and it was behind the

dealership. I came to work. I walked all the way back to the very back and there it was. And I

looked inside the vehicle. All the airbags had deployed. The car was obviously totaled.

It was a, let's see, 1997 VW Jetta, I believe black with a taupe colored interior. And I looked

inside the driver's side airbag was deployed the steering wheel and there's one little drop of blood

on it and she had had busted her lip. She was fine, but I lost it at that point. The emotion

finally hit me and I was just so grateful, you know, that she was safe. Now, one day I was sitting

in my office in 2011, January the 18th, matter of fact, 2011. And I had finished my work and it was

not quite dark yet, but it was getting there. And I jumped in my vehicle and I was driving down

11 E bypass and I got to to Walgreens where I normally turn is traffic light and my phone rang

and it was a state trooper and he said, Lenny Blaine's been in an accident. Blaine is my son

and he's we've taken him to Tacoma hospital. I said, was he going to be okay? He said,

he just said, Lenny, it's bad. And so I just blistered it to the hospital and in the emergency

room. And then I just got the worst news that a parent could get. And I was by myself in this

little room and our lives would never be the same. But you know, I can say this. I can say that

we've been blessed. You know, at that point, my son had had a son. He was two years old,

nice 17. My two daughters didn't have any children. One was, well, they were both old enough,

but we had one grandchild for, I guess, what, 10 years. And then now we have six.

And our life has been pretty good. I mean, there's always that is, you know, I've talked to many

people about it. It's something that you never get over, but you learn how to live with it.

And it's kind of like a cloud that is in the distance. It's always there,

but it's many times that most of the time now it's in the distance. But occasionally, you know,

there are triggering things like a picture or just the thought or something that you remember.

I know Tara used to, my wife used to talk about going to the grocery store after that happened.

And it was, she broke down many times in the grocery store because

she would be walking down an aisle and saying, and just this brief moment she would think,

okay, what do I need to get for Blaine? And she would just fall apart. But we've gone through

it together and it's made us stronger, I think, as a couple. And our faith obviously was the

most important part. If we didn't believe that we would see him again,

it would have been hard to move forward, although we had plenty of reasons to move forward. I'll

be back in just one minute. Okay, I hope it didn't bum you out too much. I just, I always

feel like that needs to be said whenever I talk about automotive safety. And I think that his

accident was one where even though he was in a modern vehicle, I just don't think that it would

have been survivable. Of course, you just don't know. And I don't dwell on it. I really can't

think about that accident. And whenever that, I start thinking about that, then that just takes

me down a road I don't want to go. But you know, a road that I do want to go on is protecting

future children and making sure that they get into vehicles that are safe. They're still going to

be accidents and people are going to get hurt. Some are going to die. That's just the way it is.

But I am thankful that modern vehicles are safe. And I think it's crazy for a parent or

grandparent or whatever who's providing a vehicle to their kids to put them in something that's

unsafe. I know that there are financial limitations sometimes. But the good news is if you buy something

from, you know, 2010 or newer, then they're going to be a whole lot safer than they would have been

if you put them in a 65 Mustang or a 69 Camaro. While those cars feel a whole lot more solid,

they aren't. They're not safe, especially if they don't have seatbelts. Well, thanks for listening

to this edition of My Car Guru. If you have any questions about vehicle choices for your teenager,

I'm happy to help. Send me a text to 423-552-2020 and I'll be happy to check out vehicles for you

and give you some options. And if you need help with anything automotive, just let me know. 423-552-2020

or send me an email to Lenny Lawson 2020 at gmail.com and I'll see you next time.

Thank goodness "they don't build them like they used to"....listen and learn why

About this episode

eyes off driving tech

used car values

properly maintained

Ford Mustang

Jeep

unibody construction

body on frame

collapsible steering column

side impact protection

crumple zones

safety cage

high strength steel

A pillar

B pillar

C pillar

D pillar

side impact collision

occupant deceleration

1957 Chevy

Chevrolet Impala

rollovers

Petit Le Mans

seatbelts

door beams

airbag

totaled

Volkswagen Jetta

Chevrolet Camaro

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