In reply to ProDarwin :
To address Toyman! - Reality is that the NHTSA NCAP scores are put on window stickers as a part of the law, so you can review while buying.
The safety standards are pretty much written in blood, so they provide a basement for the market.
An example - the new-ish standard that requires rear view cameras had published, as a part of the notice in the Federal Register, that 210 people were killed each year due to backovers and 15,000 people were injured. Of the fatalities, 31% were under 5 and over 70 were 26%. BTW, that standard came about because congress voted and passed an act directing NHTSA to do it (The Cameron Gulbransen Kids Transportation Safety Act of 2007).
I mean, I get the "to each their own" aspect of what you want, but we are a group of people who know and accept the risks and are in a major minority when you look across the country. The difference is that the established basement "level 1 safety" (that came about over the last 60 years by elected officials) is a much higher bar than you are personally willing to accept and setting a basement helps things in a number of ways with design, development, and manufacturing costs being amortized across a whole fleet of vehicles.
Pretty much every developed nation has a set safety basement they are willing to allow to be sold in their country. There is substantial similarity between USA, Canada, Europe, Australia, Japan, and Korea. We are much more permissible to aftermarket and personal modification of cars than Germany and Australia are as an aside, so we actually have a fair amount of freedom relative to the rest of the world.
It comes back to, if we know things can kill people (because they have killed people), we should do something to keep it from killing more people who may not be fully aware of how many people it has killed before... Relying on everyone to know all of the potential design issues for a car, be it OEM or aftermarket modification, is a bit of a stretch. That and if you ARE aware of a potential problem and provide it to someone who DOESN'T know better, tie in negligence and see where your comfort level is. At least aftermarket modification has a knowledge gateway to installing parts and intent that helps with ownership of negligence that can lead to a problem.
I probably count as Biased, as I work in the automotive safety field.
As far as the safety of the events, if enough of us who are knowledgeable cringe over aspects of modifications to the cars that are provided, believing that it could hurt or kill someone, is it right or wrong to say something about it publicly? Or should we just be quiet and say people got what was coming to them for getting in that car?