Eyes off driving tech means that some new cars can help you drive without you having to pay full attention all the time. It can take control of the car for you, making driving easier and safer.
Used car values are how much people are willing to pay for cars that have been owned before. Right now, these prices are higher than they used to be, making it tough to find cheaper cars.
Properly maintained means the car has been taken care of with regular check-ups and repairs. This helps the car last longer and work better, even if it has a lot of miles on it.
The Ford Mustang is a well-known sports car that many people love for its speed and design. It's been around for a long time and is often seen as a classic car.
Car
Jeep
Jeep is a brand that makes tough vehicles, often used for off-roading. Many people enjoy driving them because they can go on adventures in nature.
Unibody construction means that the car's body and frame are made as one piece. This makes cars safer in crashes and lighter, which helps with fuel economy.
Body on frame means that the main structure of the car is built separately from the body. This was typical in older cars, making them tough but heavier and less safe than newer designs that combine the body and frame.
A collapsible steering column is a part of the car that can bend or collapse during a crash. This helps keep the driver safer by preventing the steering wheel from hitting them hard.
Side impact protection is a safety feature in cars that helps keep people safe if another car hits them from the side. It usually includes strong parts in the doors to help absorb the crash.
Crumple zones are parts of a car that are meant to crumple or bend in a crash. This helps keep people inside the car safer by absorbing some of the crash energy instead of letting it hit them directly.
A safety cage is the strong structure inside a car that helps protect people inside during a crash. It keeps the car from collapsing too much and keeps the passengers safer.
High strength steel is a stronger type of steel used in cars to help them stay safe during crashes. It helps the car absorb energy without being too heavy.
The A pillar is the part of the car that holds up the windshield and connects it to the body of the car. It's important for keeping the car strong and safe.
A side impact collision is when another vehicle hits the side of your car. It can be very dangerous, but newer cars are built to protect you better in these situations.
The 1957 Chevy is a classic car that many people recognize. It was built during a time when cars didn't have the safety features we have today, making them less safe in crashes.
The 1965 Chevrolet Impala is a large car from the 1960s that many people loved. It didn't have the same safety features as today's cars, which can make it more dangerous in a crash.
A rollover is when a car flips over onto its side or roof. This can happen if the car turns too quickly or crashes into something. Newer cars have better safety features to help keep people safe in these situations.
Seatbelts are straps in cars that keep you safe by holding you in your seat during a crash. They became common in cars starting in the 1960s to help protect people in accidents.
Door beams are strong parts inside the doors of a car that help keep people safe if there's a crash from the side. They make the door stronger and better at handling hits.
An airbag is a soft bag that pops out in a car during an accident to help protect people inside from getting hurt. It's an important safety feature in cars today.
When a car is 'totaled', it means it's so damaged that it would cost more to fix than the car is worth. Usually, the insurance company will declare it a total loss.
The Volkswagen Jetta is a small car that people often use for daily driving. It's known for being comfortable and good on gas, making it a popular choice for families and commuters.
The Chevrolet Camaro is a type of sporty car that was first made in the late 1960s to compete with another popular car called the Ford Mustang. It's known for being fast and having a cool design, making it a favorite among car enthusiasts and collectors.
LIVE
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.
About this episode
A deep dive into the evolution of automotive safety, contrasting modern vehicles with those from the 50s, 60s, and 70s. Lindy Lawson discusses the benefits of contemporary design, including crumple zones and advanced safety features that significantly reduce injury risk in accidents. He shares personal stories about his children's experiences with car accidents, emphasizing the importance of choosing safe vehicles for young drivers. The episode also critiques emerging driving technologies, highlighting generational differences in trust towards automation.
