Oh my God, how did I survive....
Learned how to drive on '70s American tanks, minimal safety features, no air bags, no abs, no auto four wheel drive, no stability control...Drove them on country roads in the suburbs, (winter = snow+ice) on the beat to all hell landscape of NYC (ie West Side Highway, FDR Drive, Major Degan Expway, etc)....
And, as a broke college student, drove something even much more dangerous, engineered not in the USA, but in Wolfsburg, yes the original rear engined air cooled VW Beetle, complete with swing axle rear suspension (used 'till 69 or so, and used by Porsche till '62, used by M-Benz and others..)
Next got a bit more cash, drove an '80 Honda Civic 1300 that weighted all of 1800 lbs, in and out of big bad NYC (Manhattan) without incident every summer for 4 years....
Drove a few more Japanese cars over the next 18 years, none of which had ABS...
Finally switched to Jeeps, which increased my real world safety factor in winter driving by 100 % compared to front drive....
My one concession to extra safety, is this: our most dangerous driving condition, is not caused by errant animals on the road (OK New York Taxi drivers might fit that description)...its snow and ice...so both Jeeps and the Subaru, are equipped with studded snow tires on steel rims each winter. No one else that I know does that but it is a meaningful increase in real world safety.
Interested parties might take a look at this:
http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/pdf/ESV/esv16/98S2W35.PDFAn excerpt:
Performance in the “moose-test” with a given vehicle
is mainly determined by the individual steering behaviour
which is dependent on the driver’s capabilities and motivation.
Significant differences between groups of drivers
(motor journalists, expert drivers, normal drivers), high
variations within the groups and considerable intraindividual
variations lead to the conclusion that this manoeuvre
cannot be classified as an objective and reliable test
for the active safety of a car.The “moose-test” is supposed to test the vehicle reactions
in an evasive manoeuvre caused by an obstacle
which suddenly appears in front I at the right hand side of
the vehicle. In earlier research work at Daimler-Benz
concerning driver behaviour in critical situations (driving
simulator and real vehicles, different kinds of obstacles,
different speeds from 60 -120 km/h), braking or braking
combined with steering were found as the most frequent
reaction. Drivers who tried to cope by steering produced
lower values for steering wheel angles and steering velocities
than those found in the “moose-test” (see e.g.
Zomotor, 1991). So it can be said that the test procedure
requires a driving behaviour which does not seem to be
typical for all drivers in critical situations.
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