Photo: Ford
Your latest car is a lot safer than the one you've driven before, and the next one you buy might actually feature technology that should, in theory, prevent it from every being involved in a crash.
The time when a 35 mph crash could have been a fatal one is long gone thanks to a series of safety features that have started to find their way onto our cars for decades now. But if it all started with seatbelts and airbags and brake or stability control systems, today's technology is a lot more complicated than that.
The ultimate goal is to have as few road incidents as possible, and absolutely no human casualties whatsoever. It's what Volvo openly promises to achieve in just a few years and what other carmakers are also striving toward with their self-driving programs.
So the tech is there to prevent a crash, but since we humans are still in charge of our vehicles, they inevitably tend to occur. And when they do, the extra pieces of kit meant to protect the occupants make repairing the vehicle that more expensive, leading to insurance companies to declare it totaled.
"In the past, if you had a front-end collision, you had damage to the engine or the front end," says Bob Tschippert, senior vice president of underwriter Risk Theory, quoted by Automotive News. "But now, with the number of airbags that can run from $1,000 up to $4,000 and all the sensors up front, you're seeing more totals."
And it's not just the airbags. Most cars now have a radar up front used by the automated braking system and the adaptive cruise control. Replacing all this, together with the engine, is simply deemed too expensive by the insurance companies, which leads to the odd situation where the safety features are the ones responsible for the growing number of total losses following accidents.
If deciding whether a car was worth repairing or not used to be a pretty straightforward thing, thanks to all the hidden and expensive tech, it certainly isn't anymore. And the funny part is that most of those features were there precisely to prevent the accident from happening.
The ultimate goal is to have as few road incidents as possible, and absolutely no human casualties whatsoever. It's what Volvo openly promises to achieve in just a few years and what other carmakers are also striving toward with their self-driving programs.
So the tech is there to prevent a crash, but since we humans are still in charge of our vehicles, they inevitably tend to occur. And when they do, the extra pieces of kit meant to protect the occupants make repairing the vehicle that more expensive, leading to insurance companies to declare it totaled.
"In the past, if you had a front-end collision, you had damage to the engine or the front end," says Bob Tschippert, senior vice president of underwriter Risk Theory, quoted by Automotive News. "But now, with the number of airbags that can run from $1,000 up to $4,000 and all the sensors up front, you're seeing more totals."
And it's not just the airbags. Most cars now have a radar up front used by the automated braking system and the adaptive cruise control. Replacing all this, together with the engine, is simply deemed too expensive by the insurance companies, which leads to the odd situation where the safety features are the ones responsible for the growing number of total losses following accidents.
If deciding whether a car was worth repairing or not used to be a pretty straightforward thing, thanks to all the hidden and expensive tech, it certainly isn't anymore. And the funny part is that most of those features were there precisely to prevent the accident from happening.
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