I just saw a stupid stupid accident.

turboswede wrote:

DrBoost wrote: My driver's ed (no drivers in Detroit schools were educated BTW) instructor said "in my class we don't say 'accident'. It's an incident. Every time a vehicle comes into contact with anything other than the air, or airborne water it was avoidable." I've found this to be true. If you have a single vehicle accident because a ball joint broke, well, no doubt that ball joint was clunking for a few months prior, etc. Adrian, glad you were all doing The Southfield Crawl and were saved.

Unless you have a Fiat 124 Spider with one of the bad balljoints that went around a while back. They tended to let go without warning. I agree with you otherwise.

I had one of those last less than 3000 miles before it blew apart into 4 pieces. Ball, shaft, and both parts of the (spot)welded clamshell

Was this at Oakwood and Southfield? I saw cops all over and part of Oakwood closed this morning.

I lived in Novi, MI for about five years. I worked in Canton, which was a relatively short, easy drive, but my wife worked at Henry Ford Hospital in downtown Detroit. She saw stupidity every day, and luckily avoided most of it. We moved back home to Indianapolis, where drivers drive slower and with more respect (usually.) My wife and I still get aggravated with too-slow drivers, but we don't miss the stupidity that was Detroit driving.

This is why car makers are making so many cars with fancy electronic aids:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2201_cKicGA

Unfortunately, people are very adept at breeding better and better idiots and its a losing battle.

I would argue that foolishly attempting to idiot-proof cars does us the disservice of weakening the breed. If self-important, makeup-applying, texting, in-a-hurry-to-get-nowhere bad drivers can walk away from serious crashes that they cause, Darwin has been thwarted, and we are the poorer for it.

1988RedT2 wrote: I would argue that foolishly attempting to idiot-proof cars does us the disservice of weakening the breed. If self-important, makeup-applying, texting, in-a-hurry-to-get-nowhere bad drivers can walk away from serious crashes that they cause, Darwin has been thwarted, and we are the poorer for it.

I disagree, car related fatalities have dropped from around 50K per year in the late 70's early 80's to around 33/34k per year these days despite the number of cars going up from around 160 mil to 250 mil. That says a lot for improved safety features and aids.

which goes to what 1988RedT2 said at the end of his last post

In reply to Adrian_Thompson:

I'm inclined to agree, but I wish we could get some numbers on the proportion of people who are injured/killed because someone else did something stupid. Or what the gains would be if we had the improved crash structures/airbags/etc but didn't have dashboard Facebook (or its less-inflammatory cousins).

My impression is that drunk driving is less prevalent than that point in time, and I wonder how that adds in (are we swapping drunks for texters?)

An amusing clip: The Driven Man (Rowan Atkinson BBC series), on distraction and the car becoming a safer place to have a crash.

In reply to Ransom:

Was that Mr. Bean?!

Everybody would be much more courteous and attentive when driving if the passenger compartment were little more than a glass bubble hanging off the front of the car...It's the old 'mutually assured destruction' philosophy on safety.

depends on whether it's legal to make the MIL ride in the bubble

Zombie threads aren't bad IMO, but canoe revived zombie threads suck.

Zombie canoe deleted.

Crash or collision might be an acceptable term.