traingang

cars are made to be garbage. the safety messaging for how a bump renders the car totaled is pure propaganda. US safety standards are a patchwork of major regulatory capture that protect manufacturers and sellers of vehicles for the US market, at the expense of the rest of us.

the most notable capture is the "non-passenger work truck" carveout for AMC jeeps that helped them stay in business by letting their dangerous shitboxes avoid being safety regulated like cars. of course, that exception was purchased, grandfathered and exploded to include SUVs and crossovers which is why those are the only vehicles one can find anymore.

their lack of compliance with typical passenger safety standards has made them outrageously profitable compared to cars, which is why american vehicles have diverged so much from the rest of earth.

cars being so fragile is about increasing vehicle purchase churn. "safety" in the US vehicle market today is all about being the biggest vehicle on the road, which is making everything more dangerous for the communities subject to all these land tanks that protect the driver, but endanger everyone else, and need to be replaced anyway when they bump something.

I'm wondering whether this is due to the emotional bond. Like removed from what people think about cyclists you can rock up on a janky old thing anywhere and nobody but the dentists would care. While if you have a dent in your car, people think it's trashy.

With a little car seat for Beaver jr!

We've got em, we use em. A couple of Trek Verve 2+'s that we picked up used a few years back. One of them basically brand new, and I've put about a thousand miles on it over the course of two years. I like that they're mid-drive and use torque sensors, they feel very natural to use. I never did figure out how to adapt the proprietary rear rack to work with a kid's car seat, but we ended up getting a two seat trailer.

Be very careful about this. A major driver for cars being easily 'totalled' is modern core chassis design - it's all one big piece, and made to be very minimalised, so as soon as you slightly bend or crumple it, it's basically impossible to put that metal back such that it's safe to drive again.

It may look and function perfectly fine, but if it comes under any stress, or a crash, they can snap or fail in a way that's very lethal.

Car manufacturers obviously love it because planned obsolescence hell yeah

But fuck them and fuck cars without dents.

Fuck 'em up til they've got dents.