Reader question:
What kind of car is the safest car?
Robert
The kind that isn’t moving.
No, that’s not true. Collisions happen with immobile objects all of the time, so even being turned off, locked up, and in your garage isn’t necessarily going to make your vehicle something that isn’t a hazard. Owning and driving a car will probably always be a dangerous practice, which is bound to be the case whenever dealing with something so large that goes at so great a speed. However, cars are not all the same, and their safety is relative. Some cars do much better than others in a collision, and some are less likely to cause them and less likely to be hurt in them. Figuring out where your desired car falls on this line is key when you go to buy a new car.
The safest cars hail from Europe, mostly because European countries have stricter laws when it comes to safety features on cars. In the United States, many of the safety features that exist today are optional, and only a few, such as air bags and seat belts, are actually required. Cars from Europe, which are also better for the environment, again due to stricter European laws, like Mercedes, BMW, Volvos, and Saabs, fare much better in car crash test results than American vehicles.
Most of these cars come with a lot of the newer technology, like adaptive seat belts which change at the point of crash to help protect more, air bags galore, and passive safety systems. One way to figure out if the car you want comes out well in safety, because, face it, not everyone can get a Mercedes Benz, is to go and check out what the crash test result for it is. To do this, you can go to the National Highway Traffic Safety Association and see their results online. Cars that have five star ratings in every category are where you want to go.
Cheers,
Fashun Guadarrama.