Just take a moment and think about this in light of our modern standards. It seems absolutely insane. This was a safety advance that had a proven record of being effective at getting people to wear safety belts, but nobody wanted anything to do with it.

What’s with this “there was once a time” nonsense? We don’t have interlocks *today*. People *today* don’t want them, either. They are a bad idea now, and were an even worse idea in 1974 when they would have been implemented with a tangle of junk relays and switches which would have been absurdly unreliable. 

Maybe she did wonder why it was stuck. But once she identified it as the fuel door, her task became “get the fuel door unstuck.”

He’s wrong because he’s a backmarker? Would you reverse your opinion if he were a championship contender?

Some GT cars are heavier than other GT cars. What else is new.

The difference is only a matter of degree. Most of their design goals overlap considerably. In every traditional sense of the term, both cars are GTs.

Your unattributed quotation is the generic, ahistoric, modern definition of the term “sports car,” which is more than elastic enough to include the Mustang or any GT.

I don’t care about these irrelevant categories, but if you’re going to correct people at least get it right.

GT vs. sports car are old distinctions that are meaningless today. They’re both GTs by those standards.

That S-10 may have a bigger bed.

Meanwhile nothing you’d find in Madame Curie’s lab made California’s list. 

IDK how low your competence must be if your threshold results in a minor inconvenience taking your attention for a split second being weighted beyond a backup for slamming into a tree at 70 because you fell asleep, but it seems to contradict your insistence on being an uber-competent driver.

More than that, it’s a foregone conclusion that in order to develop a car you’re going to build prototypes that will be crushed. That is built-in to the whole bargain. This is how we come to have any Focus RSes at all.

You talk about human imperfections - one of them is a propensity to conditioning. Being conditioned to rely on an unreliable system is not helpful.

A lot of these systems are awful. They’re there to add a checkbox to the feature list or to appease an agency (or as we see here, to earn a higher score).

It is obnoxious, though the Punto scores at the bottom for passive safety, too.

Everything about that old interior is so much better. Designers - and buyers - have lost their minds.

Shouldn’t have worn that dress

The snarky commentariat have no idea what trickle-down economics even means.

Understanding that spending on that stuff is of benefit to everyone is not “trickle-down economics,” it’s just “economics.” It is pure stimulus.