[argonaut]

I'm all for frugality, but with a newer car you're getting vastly improved crash safety. Over the years crash safety ratings have gotten tougher and tougher. You can browse the IIHS crash rating history for the Camry (or any other car) and you can often observe that when the IIHS introduces a new test, cars often perform poorly on it (high likelihood of injury) initially, but get better later on. https://www.iihs.org/ratings/vehicle/Toyota/camry-4-door-sed.... This is it's own piece of mind.

[brailsafe]

Ya but, for 25-40k!? Newer than 92 sure, but no need for new

[staticman2]

That doesn't show you are getting vastly improved crash safety.

Only looking at injury data in the real world would show that.

It's my understanding new cars are not significantly safer than cars from 10 years ago.

[okaram]

I haven't found the safety data, but was very surprised when my new car was way cheaper to insure than my old one. I assume the insurance companies have the data.

This may not be safer as in better crash resilience, but safer as in you have a backup camera, and side sensors for changing lanes.

[walrus01]

I wonder how much of the new car being cheaper to insure was the liability only portion of the insurance vs the comprehensive. How much of your risk is seen as so much greater by insurance companies as likely to be at fault in causing an accident in a ten year old car vs new.

[letitbeirie]

Not entirely surprising - the biggest change in car technology over the past few years has been the inclusion of driver assistance features and liability is the most expensive component of auto insurance.

[guardiangod]

>It's my understanding new cars are not significantly safer than cars from 10 years ago.

How did you come to that? The new cars are new and there's no real world statistics for them yet, if you only go by real world data.

[cjrp]

> Only looking at injury data in the real world would show that.

What if technology in the newer cars (adaptive cruise control, forward collision warning, etc.) prevents injuries altogether?

[flyinglizard]

And also active safety driver aids which prevent accidents in the first place. If you can afford a new car, by all means you should.

[MisterTea]

Most of the safety driver aids seem to paper over incompetency and the fact that people can't put their phones down while operating a deadly vehicle. Been driving for 20+ years and no accidents. I also mainly drive older vehicles without any such tech save for ABS. Stay focused on the task at hand and be responsible. If you cant do that, then surrender your drivers license and use an alternative transportation method.

[hellojesus]

I've anecdotally found that the improved safety features have led to near-crashes for me, simply by making the auto behave unexpectedly.

Most notably this happens when I'm driving down the freeway, and the car thinks something is in front of us that isn't and randomly slams on the breaks.

It has also happened when other negligent drivers have started merging into my lane (where I am), and the vehicle slams on the breaks, against my better judgement of slamming on the gas to avoid the collision because it would have been safer.

My daily driver is old and has no security features, and modern rentals are a nightmare for exactly those reasons.

Also, what's with the newer cars randomly beeping at me to communicate instead of presenting an actual sentence of information? Almost all the time I have no idea why the safety features are engaging because they only communication is a beep of some kind, leaving me confused and taking my eyes off the road to look for some supporting message in the car's interface.

[bluGill]

> Been driving for 20+ years and no accidents

That is luck not skill. Humans are not good drives and never can be.

> Stay focused on the task at hand and be responsible.

That helps. It would help some more if you would also get updated training - safety engineers have discovered a lot of things over the years that few people know.

[wlesieutre]

>That is luck not skill.

It's both. Even if an accident is the other driver's fault, there are plenty of cases where driving more defensively would have let you avoid it.

But yes, there's luck too. If you're sitting in traffic at a red light and someone drives into you, not a lot you could do to prevent it.

[bluGill]

Luck is enough. The average road is about 2 accidents per million miles. https://www.dot.ny.gov/divisions/operating/osss/highway/acci... so if we assume the OP doesn't drive drunk he is isn't enough above average to claim skill based on the evidence we have.

More importantly, the OP should not claim skill even if he has some: that leads to complacency. If he claims luck he is more likely to admit he isn't perfect and thus pay attention to changes in what he best practice for driving. What he was taught in drivers training 20 years ago assuredly has some things that we now know were wrong, and it didn't even cover some things we now know is important.

[kittiepryde]

I don't think bluGill is entirely wrong ( as indicated by the downvoting ), the average driver believes they're better than the average, which isn't possible. But, I'm sure, the average person is much better than then average _some_ of the time, and they're thinking about their best when they rank themselves -- I think this falls into the same reasoning as, 'we judge others based on their actions and we judge ourselves based on our intentions' -- intending to drive error free is likely much more common than actually driving error free

But, it also sounds like, some of the driver assist features aren't so good yet either ( reading many of the other comments in this thread )

[JumpCrisscross]

> That is luck not skill. Humans are not good drives and never can be.

This is a stretch. The better argument is that the best human reflexes can't react to others' stupidity with the speed and precision modern safety mechanisms can.