How Safe is Your Car?

The people who make those little tin and plastic boxes, we risk our lives driving around in everyday, recently unveiled their latest crop of cars, at the North American International Auto Show, in Detroit Michigan.

Horsepower, slick bodies and ergonomic interiors were the focus at this year's auto extravaganza. All those pretty little transportation units-powerful, sexy, comfortable and oh so deadly.

Despite advances in engineering and technology, no car manufacturer has managed to make a car that is safer than the streets of Murder City.

Car salesmen tell us automobiles have never been safer. But that's little comfort to the tens of thousands of people who die in car accidents every year, or to any one of the millions who have sustained a windshield lobotomy or an airbag face-lift.

Car manufacturing is one of the biggest industries in North America-and that's without taking into consideration all the secondary industries that tag along-parts and repairs, car washes, traffic tickets, tow trucks, chiropractors, hospital emergency wards and undertakers.

In a corner of Tony's auto wrecking yard, there sits mute testimony to the fragility of today's cars. A stark statement about the failure of modern safety design. The nearly new upscale family sedan has the motor pushed back into the windshield and the roof has been peeled back with the Jaws of Life, like a can of beans at a hobo's campfire.

Tony the wrecker rubs his greasy hands on his coveralls and looks out over the auto graveyard. He points to the back corner, at a pile of flattened cars.  They sit, stacked like Hank Williams vinyl-singing out a cowboy ballad of roadside carnage-tales of a collective death wish the size of Texas.

At a nearby auto body shop, business has never been better. The lads are busy resuscitating the shattered carcasses of Thunderbirds and Mustangs-sending them back out to the trenches for the next assault.

Almost everyone has been in an accident, or knows someone who has. We know the odds. But some collected cultural amnesia seems at work when it comes to purchasing a new car. Safety is way down at the bottom of our list of purchasing priorities-far below appearance, comfort or even that new car smell of plastic and glue out-gassing.

What if we made all our decisions in life based on appearance and style. Listen to a couple of guys buying mountain climbing rope.

Dave: "This 20 ply red rope is really strong."

Phil: "Yah but I don't like the color. Let's get the blue 10 ply, it goes with our jackets."

But that's exactly what we do when we allow car manufacturers to place our safety at the bottom of their list of design priorities.

Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg directed a movie a few years ago called Crash. The story is about a group of people who are sexually aroused by looking at car accidents. They take roadside rubber necking to the next level and listen to a police scanner, so they can get to the scene before the ambulance.

On the surface it's a story about a group of sick and perverted weirdoes. Dig deeper and we find a cultural curiosity about carnage and mayhem-a prurient fascination with other people's misfortune. And at some level maybe a little bit of that good old country song death wish, for ourselves.

Tony the auto wrecker didn't study to be an engineer. Still, he seems to know at least as much as any Detroit design specialist when it comes to safety.

"You want to make a car safe, then that's the very first thing you've got to think about when you designing your vehicle." Tony says. "The car companies have it backward. They're more concerned with what the car look like, than about passenger safety."

Tony should know, he's built a lot of cars, and been in a lot of accidents. On weekends he races his hand made car at tracks all around the province.

His car is ugly and awkward looking by modern design standards. It's built from strong light tubing and looks like a cage with wheels. When the driver is strapped in to his seat chances of injury are negligible, even at high speed.

"If I was getting paid to design cars for the public, "says Tony, "that's the frame I would start with. Then cover it with a body."

It wouldn't look pretty, but the concept would probably save thousands of people from death and injury every year. It's just one idea, and who knows how many more car engineers could come up with, if safety was the number one goal in car design.