[ashtonkem]

And buying a pre-2000 car involves giving up a lot of safety. That’s before regulators started looking at partial offset crashes, so older cars perform poorly if you clip a pole or oncoming vehicle with one of the headlamps.

[throwaway0a5e]

You gain basically nothing in safety from the adoption of airbags in the early 90s to the improvements in roof strength and passenger cabins in the mid-00s (many models had their improvements in the early 00s because the regulations were known in advance). From there nothing changes until the proliferation of side curtain airbags.

[ashtonkem]

Safety as a step function, basically.