Modern Autos Lack Efficacy/Efficiency

(1) "Pro's complaints are about choices that people make in buying [cars]" http://pricinginsider.carsdirect.com... The cheapest car you can buy as of a few months ago is a full five orders of magnitude in terms of dollars. We should be at four for what our technology is apparently capable of. You can't blame the consumers when they never have the option for the really cheap car. Whether you blame the public or private sector for this is irrelevent - someone is screwing us badly. It doesn't take ten thousand dollars to make a box with wheels with a motor; Con is no doubt going to complain that we need to keep investing in r&d to keep safety and efficiency high but this is horse manure because that research should be complete by now. R&d at this point is just to keep the looks sleeker and the onboard electronics fancier and we should have had the option all along to buy super-inexpensive vehicles using proven pre-existing designs. (2) No objective criteria for "best." All the criteria discussed so far are objective enough, not the least of which price. (3) The biggest reason for needing a big car for safety is to protect against other big cars. Without big cars, everyone would be safe enough in little ones. If everyone drove bicycles nobody would feel the need for safety of owning an SUV, but if other people started driving SUVs down the bike paths then all of a sudden that need would become apparent. Sure, bikes don't go as fast as cars, but light-weight vehicle going 35 mph would be relatively safe with little more than a metal frame around the driver to protect them. Safety Large truck traffic is relatively minimal and these vehicles are not difficult to maneuver away from, unlike SUV traffic which is numerous and just as versatile on the road as you are. Con proves my slippery-slope argument by citing the saftey from trees/poles etc: we want to be safer from these collisions, so we get bigger vehicles to do it! The logical course of action to reduce risk in these instances is to slow down, not get bigger vehicles. Also, smaller vehicles do in fact help in head-on collisions. There is no safety factor a larger vehicle provides that also isn't achievable by just slowing down. If laws concerning traffic were changed to put people with heavier vehicles at higher risk of fault in collisions, we could balance off the risk so that there would be no incentive for buying big to be safe. Small enough cars should be able to bounce around and hit each other quite a bit with no damage at all even under bad conditions, if you think about it, because there isn't enough weight to do any damage. "I've shown that they provide practical safety, comfort, and utility." If cars were smaller then safety would be easier to achieve because vehicles wouldn't cause as much damage upon impact. Safety is only truly achieved by reducing speed. Comfort and utility are secondary concerns. The only main factors from a physics standpoint in a collision are speed and mass. All the other factors like crumple-zones, side-impact airbags, crash-detection sensors, and all that jazz are just to help make auto companies more money to make you feel safer while delivering you a big dangerous auto to go kill someone with. If we sold small, inexpensive vehicles and sacrificed speed in every instance where safety was a concern, there would be no need for these expensive pseudo-safety measures. In a sense he is right in this instance that it is the choice people make, but it's hard to just blame the consumers in an economy like this because everything is so waxed over in advertising, manipulative culture, regulations, and ultimately the lack of a viable alternative to set a new standard. We are all suffering with unsafe highways because of these vehicles and the remedy is so simple and so easy, yet we are not allowed, for one reason or another, to not make the change we need to small, safe, efficient vehicles that will save our wallets as well as our heads in crashes. Needs We don't have "needs." If we can't afford these vehicles, which we can't from both an economic and environmental standpoint, and they aren't safe, then all our other needs are secondary and we should re-evalute them. Cost Having a cheaper car does not give you a more dangerous car. It theoretically gives you a safer car because it is smaller and lighter. We can achieve a harmony of efficiency and safety at a cost-threshold somewhere in the range of a few thousand-dollars without paying 10-20 grand for a fancy automobile with onboard electronics, aggressive marketing and sales, and all the bells and whistles that come with it.