You forgot one:

I mean, of all the highways on which to learn to drive, I-70 through Kansas is pretty fuckin’ high on the “easy-to-learn” list, LOL. Good on you, uncle.

1976 Olds Toronado - The first car I ever got behind the wheel of on a public highway.

Relax, this car is probably safer than all the vehicles ever created prior to the year 2000. Things getting safer is good but at a certain point we’re talking about marginal gains and it gets proportionally more expensive for consumers.

“And, as you can likely tell from the video, the fact that it just, uh, disintegrates isn’t all that promising, either.”

It looked damned good for a subcompact car in a frontal impact, to be honest. If it had US mandated side impact beams in it that would have looked good too.

The other half of the scoring is people…

I don’t doubt that the car isn’t as safe as some others on the road.
However, something i really dislike is that a 1 star car from the late 90s, early 2000s means that you’re either dead or lost some limbs.
Meanwhile, this thing seems safer than many 0 or 1 star cars from 15 years ago, and only gets 1 star?
I would…

This is a zero star? Maybe the standards for a zero star have gotten raised quite a bit, I remember those old Daewoo NHSTA videos that were horrific, and as an insurance adjuster I am not super familiar with how bad a hit at this speed should look but I have seen a lot worse things in my time and these look pretty par…

Wiki says the Brazilian model got four stars in LatinNCAP in 2015, so between these two, we’re mostly talking a vehicle being left behind a moving safety standard rather than an inherently unsafe car.

For the tiny economy shitbox that the Ford Ka is, I think it’s doing pretty well. It’s just that’s its performance falls under the thresholds of a forced distribution system that’s marking it a zero. It still looks more survivable than a 90’s economy shitbox.  

This has crumple zones and front airbags, and is probably just as safe structurally as any other car of similar size sold in the US, and safer than those from 25 years ago.

I am sure many of us are driving “older” cars that would not do half as well... watching the front crashes where the cabin does not deform, and heck the windshield survived... For reference here is a 1997 civic

In my experience, if you treat people like idiots they act the part. And we’ve made an art-form out of treating people like idiots so that we can go all PT Barnum on ‘em. For their own good, of course.

Yes, that’s the other side of the coin for sure. I’m not necessarily defending the practice, just pointing out what they’re trying to accomplish.

What that is, is keeping modern - safe - vehicles expensive so that people who need them can’t afford them. Because it’s real easy to spend somebody else’s money.

Very handy to note: somewhere in the last few years NCAP decided to seriously crank up the star requirements. Now if you cannot get safety assists, it’s an automatic zero. Safety assists optional but not standard? 3 starts max.

Remember the Fiat Punto? Was 5 stars in 2005, now 0 in 2017. Same car, still pretty safe.…

My first car was a Triumph Spitfire. I would hear from classmates on a regular basis that I was going to die driving that thing.

And yet this car is MUCH safer than the ‘84 Jetta GLI that I put 200K miles on. And that car was probably “safer” than the ‘89 Ford Escort that I had a 65mph T-bone crash in and walked away with a bruised shoulder. From forcing the door open after the crash. It’s also in another universe from the Triumph Spitfire I…

She probably means this iteraction. The original ka is long gone, this thing that took the name was a rebadged Figo for the Brazilian Market, and is a complete different animal.

Hmmm. Perhaps I’m too laissez faire, and certainly the actual sensors involved may show a more serious outcome for vehicle occupants, but superficially, those crash tests don’t look nearly as bad as plenty of others I’ve seen. Having lived most of my life driving vehicles *without* side airbags, it’s not as if I…

I really dislike these “Stars” and “Percentages”. Just give me the actual data! How many G’s did each dummy suffer? Any whiplash? Any strikes from inside the cabin?