The good old free market, sans government regulation, came up with a lot of automotive safety innovations we take for granted. And a lot of government regulations made driving more dangerous. From Eric Peters at ericpetersautos.com:
It wasn’t the government that made cars safer to drive. It was the free market that made them less likely to crash.
Which made them safer to drive. As opposed to “safer” to crash. The latter is what we get from government, which has also made cars more likely to crash by – among other things – making them harder to see out of, which resulted from the car companies being obliged to make them safer to be inside of when you crashed them. More metal – less glass. The doors held up better to impact forces such as the car coming at you from the side you didn’t see and pulled out in front of.
Government fixed the blind spots its “safety” mandates caused by mandating blind spot alert systems and rearview camera systems, to help drivers avoid backing up over kids and others they couldn’t see behind them anymore, due to the government’s crashworthiness requirements.
But it wasn’t the government that mandated radial tires, to cite one example of a design improvement that made cars safer to drive by making them handle and brake better. Radial tires also improve the vehicle’s fuel economy and they last longer, which conserves both natural resources and people’s resources (i.e., their money, which they spend less of). The government had nothing to do with getting radial tires into circulation. It was car manufacturers such as Pontiac, which was one of the first to offer not just radial tires as factory-installed equipment but also a Radial Tuned Suspension (RTS) system designed around radial tires.
