SAFETY FEATURES

We went with the Prius. It looks like an anteater, but it gets that great mileage and makes you feel like you’re doing something for the planet. Sometimes you just have to do the right thing.

It came with a trunkfull of safety features, most of them pretty standard. The one I could live without is the seatbelt alarm. I don’t much care for wearing seatbelts, but two seconds after you put the car in gear – just enough time to get rolling – a steady beeping sound begins, like a heart monitor. You reach back for the seatbelt, but some design engineer who probably takes the bus has placed it so far behind you it’s hard to grab. Three seconds later the beeps double, and I’m pretty sure they get louder. Now the pressure starts to build; you wish you had lost that stupid five pounds so your fat butt wouldn’t be covering the receptor half of the buckle. You can’t drive - it’s too annoying. You have to pull over and try to buckle up. You feel like screaming, “Open the pod bay doors, Hal.”

Worse than that, this particular safety feature wasn’t even designed for your safety. The insurance industry pressured legislators to mandate seatbelt use as a way of increasing profits by reducing serious injuries. That the law happened to benefit drivers and passengers is little more than a happy accident. Believe me, if the insurance industry could make higher profits from crippling injuries, the Special Olympics would be much bigger.

On the other hand, if the government really did care about driver safety they wouldn’t allow freeways to look like NASCAR tracks. Since the majority of traffic deaths result from high speed crashes, reducing traffic deaths is as easy as reducing speed. Perhaps just a simple, annoying alarm whenever you top 65 mph. Oh, wait a minute, I forgot, we can’t reduce speed. In order to sell more cars, the auto industry uses speed to create the image of sex appeal, convincing every-day car buyers that they are actually sexy car racers (frankly I’m surprised each Mustang and Corvette doesn’t come with a jar of personal lubricant for in-car masturbation).

Certainly some traffic deaths are inevitable, but forty to fifty thousand lives could be saved every year if the auto industry could just figure out a different marketing strategy. On the other hand, you gotta love a government that so blatantly panders to its financial supporters.

a foot on either side

Bart Braverman