Why Did Black Traffic Fatalities Explode After George Floyd’s Death?

There can’t be THAT many Ford Pintos still on the road, could there?

OK, for you snobs still wearing your Izod shirts, I’ll put it in terms you might be more familiar with: There can’t be THAT many Mercury Bobcats still on the road, could there?

Probably the result of more white drivers running black drivers off the road. No?

We don’t know all the details on this graph. What percentage of road deaths in each race were associated with alcohol and drugs?

Were black drivers operating vehicles that were older and less well maintained?

Were blacks driving more after Floyd? In which states were the biggest differences seen?

That’s an explosion? What, a cherry-bomb?

Why Did Black Traffic Fatalities Explode After George Floyd’s Death?

Because the news for white people is not all bad all the time.

Steve, could you include the link to the data you are mining for your graph?

I’ve been meaning to send another “Dad Advice” email to my kids about traffic safety in light of the post-Floyd-OD surge. I’ve started binging, but so far ended up on one the CDCs blah, blah, blah, blah–“we need to keep our talentness bureaucrats employed”–story pages.

Don’t we know the answer to this?

It was obviously Chris Brown and Young Thug’s release of “Go Crazy” in May 2020.

Somewhat OT:

White senior data scientist at Thompson-Reuters tries to emulate Mr. Sailer’s methods in looking at the statistics of police shootings of blacks. Gets fired from \$350,000 a year job for his pains.

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/i-criticized-blm-then-i-was-fired?s=r

ps: I trust it is okay to link to another blog, especially when it is directly tied to the themes explored here.

Probably the result of more white drivers running black drivers off the road. No?

No that’s not it at all. They’re swerving off the road and into oncoming lanes and running red lights to get away from effeminate British men chasing after them to try and give them tongue baths. Have you no shame, sir?

What is more striking is that total miles driven/volume of motor vehicle traffic should have been way down over the same period.

I remember driving on I-95 back then and it was eerie that most days there were maybe one or two other cars for vast stretches of highway.

January of 2010: brothas be all like, imma resolve to ride a bike, for the Environment. I saw this movie a few years back, An Incontinent Truth, and I don’t want the polar bears to swim south and eat us all because, they’re huge.

There are too many bald middle aged black men driving slingshot cars up and down urban expressways.

My un-scientific 2 cents, based largely on my experience and observations from living in an area which is 30% or so black.

The Regime Media would attribute this, to the extent they even bring it up, to, um… “the pandemic” or the “upheaval” which just “erupted” in the wake of the “murder” of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man. Because being locked in your residence for a period or generally upset about a junkie passing away while being arrested would make you drive off the road at a high rate of speed. Or something.

But seriously, an Unz commenter recently posted a video of Hellcat muscle car owners ignoring, running from, and generally evading the police. In some of the videos, the drivers are doing well over 120 mph or doing donuts in downtown city streets with pedestrians in the area.

I get it: Kids have always gotten a rush out of driving fast and evading the cops, from bootleg booze runners to the antics depicted in the “Hot Rods to Hell” film from 1966 to the “cruising” epidemic in the 90s. I’ve received my share of speeding tickets.

The thing is, the 2022 version of “Hot Rods to Hell” is less skilled, more impulsive, more violent, and imbued with a sense of “I’m Black and therefore Untouchable, bitch!” The police withdrawing from traffic enforcement is both a cause and effect of the foregoing. Who wants to be the next Derek Chauvin? Killing an “unarmed Black man” when he tries to drive off or run you over during a traffic stop. That’s what was happening when that female cop in Minneapolis accidentally shot that guy when she meant to tase him. Leaving aside questions about the cop’s competence in general, the point is that this was a traffic stop where the “Black” motorist just didn’t’ feel like getting pulled over and detained.

Probably the result of more white drivers running black drivers off the road. No?

…..please don’t drift into tiny duckism.

Police try to pull them over, and hilarity ensues. Would be interested in how many autos involved in Black Car Fatalities are stolen, or uninsured.

Seriously, this is yet another reason for the De-Whitening. When Whites are eliminated, this question will no longer be pertinent.

I don’t think there’s any doubt that blacks have gotten more cavalier behind the wheel due to their recently-granted blanket-immunity from arrest/criticism. In Chicago, they are doing intersectional burnout circles around literal rings of fire, within which their homies brave the smoke and flames to livestream the vehicular assclownery.

The white uptick overlaps so it might be that less conscientious and speed-loving car guys were the main ones out on the roads during the pandemic and were driving faster than usual due to lower traffic and police presence. The ‘Cannonball Run’ record was beaten several times during 2020/2021.

It’s interesting that there was a significant and stable drop for white drivers around Jan 2009. Did it have something to do with how the data was collected? It seems to appear in the black data too but it then departs around 2014.

The white totals also show more relative seasonality, maybe indicating the wider distribution of whites in places where it’s too dangerous to drive too reckless in winter or where summer really is summer and people get much more energy. I remember once reading that the highest call out rates for all emergency services tends to hover around the longest day of the year because that’s when the most people are out and about for the longest time rather than at home. But maybe it’s just a trick of the relative scales of the data and or a stochastic effect of sample size.

Generally the term used by the media and Steve is ‘racial reckoning’ but I saw one publication use ‘racial uprising’ and I think it fits it more.

During the same period there was a minor scandal in South Korea when ‘US servicemen’ went on a bit of a firework rampage in public there in Busan for the fourth of July. I can’t think of anything that happened in the US that might have inspired them.

https://www.stripes.com/theaters/asia_pacific/us-troops-accused-of-wreaking-havoc-at-july-fourth-beach-party-in-south-korea-1.636586

https://taskandpurpose.com/news/army-korea-fireworks-brawling/
“It was totally like a foreign country”

https://en.yna.co.kr/view/AEN20200706002600315

South Korea.

Why Did Black Traffic Fatalities Explode After George Floyd’s Death?

It doesn’t seem like there was much of an explosion. Once you discount for the seasonal variation and the slight preexisting uptrend, we might be looking at 60 or 70 additional deaths each for three consecutive quarters, and then a decline back to baseline. In both cases, the slope of the change is mirrored by the change in white deaths, but the magnitude of the proportion is larger for blacks.

There is no evidence that this has any connection with George Floyd, as suggested by the title of the post. The Covid lockdowns were hard on people, and hardest on those at the lower end of the economic spectrum. This is just more of that iatrogenic “all-cause mortality” that went unexamined during the non-pandemic.

A closely related issue:
Why does it take women 15 minutes to reach orgasm, while men can do it in 5?
Who cares.

OK, for you snobs still wearing your Izod shirts

Hey, my 12 year old Izod has retained its shape better than most (China made) clothing I bought in the years since.

Demoralized police and the kultursmog.

Salutary relations across the color bar require certain principles be adhered to, among them (1) everyone faces the same laws and the same standards; (2) each human being has a certain intrinsic value to which is added the value they have to their family and to other inherent communties to which they belong to which is added value derived from performance and only performance; (3) each person has agency until proven otherwise. The professional-managerial bourgeoisie is determined that none of these principles be adhered to.

How about cops stop with the stupid traffic stops. They put their lives and others in danger. I don’t understand how conducting a traffic stop makes the population safer.

Just end the charade.

Are these numbers adjusted by population? What happened between 2007-2010 that caused white deaths to plunge? Can it be replicated or expanded?

Fewer stops for speeding.

OT (sort of): Another shooting of Asian women, but this time it looks ‘random’ ( ie black perp):

https://nypost.com/2022/05/11/three-women-shot-at-dallas-hair-salon/

Ford Pinto (Top Secret!)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_Secret!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Pinto

My parents also thought that Mick Jagger was responsible for many of the ills of the world.

Why Did Black Traffic Fatalities Explode After George Floyd’s Death?

For the exact same reason that Black crime in general exploded. In general, “Black Lives Matter” was interpreted on the street as meaning “Since the law is inherently racist and Black people have been oppressed by it, whatever Black people do from now on no longer constitutes a crime. There’s a total amnesty on Blacks doing whatever they want to do and the cops have been instructed to look the other way. Racial justice demands that we be given free rein now to make up for all the centuries when the Man literally had his foot on our throat. George Floyd is the Black Jesus who died for our sake so that our sins could be forgiven.” Now this meaning is a distorted version of what even the most radical BLM advocates were saying but in the game of telephone where elite intellectual formulations are heard on the streets, this is how the message was heard and interpreted.

So it turns out that what Blacks really want to do is to loot and rob, kill people (mostly each other) and drive recklessly and so on. I think that if white people were told the same thing (“the criminal laws no longer apply to you”) they would go on a somewhat similar spree but not to the same extent.

The real question is why (even though they did not intend to send out quite this message), our elites were dumb/evil enough to send out messages that would be heard on the street as having this meaning and which would end up getting a lot of people killed. The blood of George Floyd was on him (and if you believe the courts, on Officer Chauvin) but the blood of the thousands and thousands of black people who have been shot, murdered, killed in car accidents, etc. is on our elites. They have a bit of a Putin problem in that despite their “good intentions” whatever they do tends to have the exact opposite result from what they intend.

Salutary relations across the color bar require certain principles be adhered to

Actually these rules are required for civilization in general and not just relations across the color bar. It’s just that racial disparities make it difficult to apply these universal principles – when you apply a universal standard to two different populations you are going to get disparate results so naturally there is a temptation to put a thumb on the scale to equalize the results in the name of “anti-racism”.

If more blacks than whites are driving recklessly or in unsafe cars, it’s easier to tell the cops not to pull people over for minor offenses or to do so only in proportion to race than it is to actually change black driving behavior. However, it’s impossible to instruct trees and telephone poles and so on to behave in an “anti-racist” manner and so reality keeps (literally) colliding with the anti-racist agenda.

OT: Will we still be able to find a full page of (African) American scientists by googling “american scientists”? It turns out that this experiment only yields two (the first two listed) black scientists.

Introducing Google Skin Tone Scales, using their 10 step Monk scale.

The latest innovation, introduced at Google’s I/O conference yesterday. Here’s how it’s supposed to work. Let’s say you’re looking for makeup; if you’re white, you don’t need to see a bunch of black models. Similarly, if you’re black you don’t need to see makeup for ghostly white Finnish models.

But what if they let you use it for any images? Now, if you google “american scientists” you can get a full list of black ones. In fact, you could get a list of really black ones, not mixed race ones. Or white ones. Or Asian/Hispanic ones.

Also, good news for followers of World War Hair; Google is also working on a labeling schema that allows images to be tagged with their hair texture.

Anyway, all true students of intersectional CRT are breathlessly awaiting this feature.

It’s funny that no one associates explosions with Mercury Bobcats even though they were virtually identical to Pintos.

The whole Pinto thing was drummed up by some reporter who wrote an article in leftist rag Mother Jones magazine – supposedly Ford did a cost benefit analysis that showed it would be cheaper to bear the costs of lawsuits than to fix all 1.5 million “defective” Pintos, showing that they were heartless capitalists who cared nothing for human lives. Except that isn’t what actually happened.

The Pinto had average accident safety for a subcompact car of its time (none the cars of that era were really that safe by modern standards) and the position of the gas tank was standard for a car of that time – between the bumper (which was more decorative than functional) and the solid rear axle. It wasn’t particularly better or worse than any other car but due to that article it became a cause celebre and the government and Ford had to do a recall for PR reasons if nothing else.

The “fix” was that they had to install a plastic shield at the front of the tank so it would be less likely to be punctured when forced into the axle bolts in a collision. I doubt that this flimsy piece of plastic really did anything but the government and Ford had to be seen as having done SOMETHING. Even now you can buy this part for maybe \$20 on ebay – it must have cost \$2 to manufacture back then:

Note the Xeroxed typewritten installation instructions. Desktop publishing was not a thing yet.

Were black drivers operating vehicles that were older and less well maintained?

Definitely not where I live. Mostly old white people drive hoopties. The cars parked in even the worst black neighborhoods are late model SUVs and luxury brands like Audi and Mercedes.

Hey, some of us are still wearing our Lacoste shirts. Izod is the downscale version, the Pinto to the Bobcat, except that Lacoste is an alligator:

I once knew the corporate president of Izod. His company had a history with Lacoste.

Kinda hard to drive…with tears in your eyes.😣

leave us not forget that, though they suck at everything else, they were formed by a million years of natural selection on the african savannah into superb hunter-gatherers. And leave us not forget that ‘hunter-gatherers’ is a euphemism for ”killer-thieves.” Thus, left to their own devices (not that they invented ANY devices) they spiral toward chaos, violence, anarchy in any application.

Google likely changed the black scientist results because it knocked Albert Einstein off in the first round. Einstein is as much of a pet of liberals as blacks are.

Actually a crocodile. Izod Lacoste is an example of a brand name that became too popular for its own good. That there was split ownership of the trademark between Izod and Lacoste did not help. Eventually the partnership ended but back under Lacoste’s ownership and with Bernard dead, the brand never really recovered (and neither did Izod).

Was it Draddy that you knew? He got his job the old-fashioned way – by marrying the boss’s daughter. Izod was proof that the NY garment business wasn’t 100% Jewish.

There is no evidence that this has any connection with George Floyd, as suggested by the title of the post.

Compounded by the fact that this is the sixth or seventh post by iSteve pushing that narrative.

Supreme Court has been bugged:

John Roberts: Sit your ass down, boy. Court is still in session.

Clarence Thomas: Sorry, Massa, I jus’ gotta take a quick leak.

JR: Any more piss-taking and you are permanently benched. And tell your Mrs to stay away from the keyhole.

Draddy? LOL, no. I’m not THAT old. We’re talking much later, late 90s and early 00s.

Regarding the garment business and Jews, there is an upscale purveyor of men’s suits, etc. in these parts that has my family name. I met the founder, a Jew who had the exact same name as my paternal grandfather. After a career on Wall Street, he started his business here in a very small way, doing his own tailoring. They’ve had clients like Paul Newman — and me. LOL. They will famously even fly to your location anywhere in the world to do your tailoring or fix a problem — for a price.

And aw shit, I made the classic alligator/crocodile mistake, but I swear I’ve heard the Lacoste logo described many times as an alligator.

Since both Black and White fatalities went up in 2020 (compared to 2019), it is probably Covid and concomitant (a) emptier streets tempting males 15-34 of all races to speed (b) low/no traffic enforcement by law enforcement. Out where I live, not only have I never been stopped, 2020 till date (no surprise), but I have rarely, if ever, seen a traffic stop, unless it involved an accident. My guess is, they have simply given up on speeding and other minor traffic infractions like not stopping at a STOP sign, illegal turns etc., May be Covid, may be Floyd.

We have to wait till Black and White fatalities trend in opposite directions to draw any conclusion.

showing that they were heartless capitalists who cared nothing for human lives.

Except, that was exactly what I was taught in Principles of Management class in 1978. To do a cost/benefit analysis of various options and pick the option with lowest cost/benefit ratio. That is how product recall decisions are made by U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, DOT NHTSA, FAA etc., They all use a dollar figure for human life and compare the cost of recall etc., with number of lives saved.

Here it is. Updated for 2021, just like price of cars:
https://www.transportation.gov/resources/value-of-a-statistical-life-guidance

It’s funny that no one associates explosions with Mercury Bobcats even though they were virtually identical to Pintos.

The whole Pinto thing was drummed up by some reporter who wrote an article in leftist rag Mother Jones magazine – supposedly Ford did a cost benefit analysis that showed it would be cheaper to bear the costs of lawsuits than to fix all 1.5 million “defective” Pintos, showing that they were heartless capitalists who cared nothing for human lives. Except that isn’t what actually happened.

The Pinto had average accident safety for a subcompact car of its time (none the cars of that era were really that safe by modern standards) and the position of the gas tank was standard for a car of that time – between the bumper (which was more decorative than functional) and the solid rear axle. It wasn’t particularly better or worse than any other car but due to that article it became a cause celebre and the government and Ford had to do a recall for PR reasons if nothing else.

It was rigged, and the people involved had to make repeated attempts, and finally inserted an ignition device, to create an explosion in spite of the rigging:

https://pintostampede.com/the-pinto-myth

At the time all bumpers were a standard height, in these test videos you can see they jacked up the back of the Impala to lower the front bumper to get it under the Pinto’s rear trying to achieve the desired effect by getting under the bumper and making direct contact with the gas tank.. , still no explosion, because there was no ignition source, they wrecked multiple Pinto’s by the way trying to get the desired effect.

The first one at 48.1 MPH. well above the standard test speed.

So the tests continued until they could get the desired explosion and nothing. Eventually they used an external ignition device to ignite the fuel and get the desired explosion effect. This is the video everyone knows and remembers. The car was sent almost 30 yards from the initial contact point by the massive impact. So, in order to make it look effective, they only showed the video in ultra slow motion to give the impression the car was not hit by 4,500 lbs. , traveling at speed, but to appear it was hardly touched.

It’s a lot like Upton Sinclair’s book, the Jungle, which was taken as fact, which he did not deny, until falsehoods were pointed out, upon which he issued a non-denial denial that it was factual.

They REALLY aren’t making Aborigines like they used to!

https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/real-life/news-life/love-triangle-south-australian-teacher-ammyclara-singleton-hits-back-at-grooming-charge/news-story/aed62484634105dba1e7387d7d901963

Didn’t Buffalo Joe have like uncles in the men’s suit business in NY and everyone thought that they were Jewish but they were really Italian?

Some American sportswriter called Rene Lacoste a “crocodile” in the 20s and thus the logo.

On Lower Wacker Drive too!

Although not as dramatic as the black rate, it appears that the white rate also spiked in 2020. Covid restriction rage?

You mean our Fred Perry shirts, perchance?

The cars parked in even the worst black neighborhoods are late model SUVs and luxury brands like Audi and Mercedes.

With aftermarket rims and illegally tinted windows. And a repo man lurking in the background.

Interesting peak for the Whites every summer with a valley during winter.

The blacks, on the average, have a smaller peak in Spring, getting outside after the Winter, then again another small peak in the Fall.

“men’s suit business in NY and everyone thought that they were Jewish but they were really Italian”

It’s the reverse, the NYC Fashion industry is dominated by Jews, all the way from raw cloth to finished clothing, wholesale and retail.

Ah yes, this brings back not so fond memories of life on my racially changing block over thirty some odd years ago. One of the first negros to move in on my block soon bought a nice new Cadillac after settling into his nice midsized Georgian across the street from me. We moved out to the burbs a few years later. Stayed too long.

There is no “Great Stagnation!”

In Chicago, they are doing intersectional burnout circles around literal rings of fire, within which their homies brave the smoke and flames to livestream the vehicular assclownery.

You’re right, Paul Lynde, young men souping up their cars for maximum performance and then showing off their work around other young men… and women, is almost unheard of!

Mmmke, Kate McKinnon, I’ll concede–you’re way more willing to totally throw yourself into total absurdism, and, thus, way funnier than me. Black drivers are basically immersed in a throwback to American Graffiti days. HAHAHAHAHAHAHA! You’re good.

between the bumper (which was more decorative than functional) and the solid rear axle.

Detroit screamed when the Naderites in Washington put out a regulation that bumpers had to absorb a 5 mph impact with no damage. It couldn’t be done!

Within weeks, Saab did it, and in a very low-tech way:

Detroit got revenge on Saab decades later.

Mostly old white people drive hoopties. The cars parked in even the worst black neighborhoods are late model SUVs and luxury brands like Audi and Mercedes.

Not too bright of them:

Mercedes tells owners of 292K vehicles to stop driving them

About ten years ago, road construction forced us off the highway and through downtown Gary, Indiana. Luckily we had our camera ready when at a major intersection we saw two or three black guys pushing a disabled full-size Caddy. I think they were aiming for a left turn, no less.

I just watched a couple of Veritasium videos about analog computers making a comeback. It was interrupted by a commercial for this:

https://shop.luvmehair.com/

Yes, the models were black. How much of the target audience would be watching Veritasium vids, hosted by Mark Rober, a former NASA engineer?

In case you’re interested, or know any young STEM-sistas who might be, here they are:

Call it a Hockey Stick.

young men souping up their cars for maximum performance and then showing off their work around other young men… and women, is almost unheard of!

But the bitching afterwards dat de bastud chilluns ain’ gots no food thanks to deadbeat daddy spending money on retarded shit like that is kinda new.

Whites-even the relatively few AFU ones way back when, took their lumps and shut TF up. All these “schtrong, proud bleck manes” do stupid shit, which ends in epic fail yet again, then cry and moan like 11 year old girls.

No. As I have correctly stayed before, white drivers of F150s and RAM trucks are running roughshod on the nation’s highways, And the cops are in the donut shop or are waiting to stop someone less menacing.

And Mr. Sailer is once again spinning his tin cup narrative in this subject. Correlation does not equal causation.

I didn’t know the brand was still around 12 years ago, Escher. I have an Izzod shirt I got from Wal-Mart, but it tore apart the 3rd time in the wash. The only part that still looks good is the iconic Komodo Dragon that is on what’s left of the chest.

OK, but seriously, Chinese made clothing from Wal-Mart was pretty solid 20 years ago. Then, Big-Biz was no longer satisfied with the profit increased due to outsourcing, so they let the quality go to hell slowly. It’s almost all crap now.

It’s even more like the rigging of the Chevy pick-up truck gas tax explosions that the Lyin’ Press did on Dateline (NBC) 30 years back. That time, they didn’t just rig up detonators or triggers, but explosives themselves.

What was different is that in 1992, the press people, Jane Pauley and Stone Philips, actually read an apology on the air, for 3 minutes. Nowadays, they would just double down on the lies.

Those pick-up trucks were said to be 20 times more likely to have gas tank leaks/explosions though, without press involvement. I appreciate the treatise by Jack D on the Pinto story., but keep in mind that’s what was to make my comment funny. If I have to explain it …

And no, I don’t keep up with all the branded clothing. The joke was that the Bobcat was the same car as the Pinto and not for the snobs, really. They would have been driving the land yachts – a Brougham or New Yorker, perhaps. You could steer with one pinkie.

Sorry Achmed- the following anecdote will serve:

Back in the early 80s a friend was doing a marketing project for Ford- in the introductory group meeting the Ford guy said something like “ we’re trying to expand our brand to groups that are not traditional Ford buyers, women, blacks… “ All of a sudden a booming rich James Earl Jones type baritone boomed from the back of the room: “SHEEE-IT. You ain’t never gonna get the brothers to buy no Fords” Matches my observation.

Tangentially; watching the Stanley Cup playoffs last night (in which my Wilds made their traditional first round exit) I noticed a ton of commercials with black guys driving pick ups, camping, etc. Nevermind the realisticness (sic) of the scenarios, how many black guys are watching the NHL playoffs? Are all the TVs in the bars in Ferguson tuned to the Blues games?

As did Alan Bloom

Hickey-Freeman is (was?) in Rochester, NY . I have a friend who grew up in Rochester; her Italian grandfather was a tailor who worked there; he came over after WW II on a special visa program for tailors.

waiting to stop someone less menacing.

Oh come on. We’re big teddy bears.

As I said! (bends wrist) Ghastly, totally ghastly what these negrows are doing to our fair city!

Back in the late ’60s to early ’70s, when I was just a kid, my Grandfather; John Rich, with my Father; William, and his other Son; Milton had developed the Rich’s Safety Bumpers filled with tap water, for use on cars, buses, and trucks. They had managed to work a deal to sell them here in Portland, Oregon for the benefit of Police vehicles, and the Metro bus line at that time, which netted them some good start-up capital. Insurance companies were offering a 20% discount for those who had this safety bumper installed, since they were going to save a lot more than that. He was the first to develop a molding process to make these large hollow rubber cells. They also made full-width bumpers that replaced your hard chrome-plated steel bumpers. It was to be filled with just common tap water for an inexpensive hydraulic function, which is an important detail to absorb this kinetic energy and reduce the force of recoil from an impact.

The hardest sales issue was how most cars at the time still had shiny chrome-plated metal bumpers, and this was a very different look for cars of that era. If you think about it; the car manufacturers long before this already had the technology to make a far superior bumper with less weight than this after-market add-on bumper. Think about how the wheels on cars need a 3 part system to continually take the weight of the car versus the impacts of the bumpiest roads without any damage occurring. One part is the metal spring to absorb the impact. The second is the shock absorber to resist the recoil effect of the spring, and the third is an inflated rubber cell to resist the smaller bump, which we call a tire, since it also has to rotate for the vehicle to move across land. This sort of system could easily have been implemented within car manufacturing for far less money by the manufacturers. Much easier, since it does not need to rotate like a wheel, but smaller rollers could be added to the outside corners to help redirect the car on impact. This system would be built within the car frame in the front and back of your car, where you are likely to have the highest speed impacts. The rubber cell alone would be able to deflect all of the low-speed contacts you are likely to encounter with no more than a scuff mark, which is over 50% of the impact cars tend to suffer. The spring would then help to handle impacts over 5 mph, with the shock absorber to reduce that recoil force of the spring now charged with this kinetic energy. Imagine what this would do for your insurance costs, as well as landfill issues with the elimination of most car shell repairs. Imagine how many millions of serious injuries could have been and could be avoided each year? Let alone deaths. Without this just making contact with a solid immovable object at over 20 mph is considered fatal. If that impact could have been reduced with this system that could make all the difference. This sort of safety bumper in a high-speed impact may not avoid any damage and injury, but it could mean the difference between injury or death. These high-speed impacts only account for less than 50% of vehicle impacts, but it is a serious issue.

Emulates Sailer but clearly doesn’t read Sailer or it wouldn’t have taken him until 2020 to start questioning the narrative.

Reminds me of that Damore guy who got fired from Google. In both cases, the crimespeak takes place on an internal chat forum (once again making me wonder why a for-profit company tolerates that kind of time wasting). In both cases, the victim is too much of a sperg to understand what he’s doing. And in both cases the victim goes public in a big way.

Maybe, but I was actually in my friend’s Pinto on the way to work when it started smoking near downtown DC., about 1981 or 82. Smoke was two stories high by the time the fire trucks got there and the firemen were very nervous. She did end up driving the car again after it was fixed, more or less.

“Oh come on. We’re big teddy bears.“

Appearances can be deceiving. When burly white men get stopped for excessive speeding, they go all pavement ape.

The whole Pinto thing was drummed up by some reporter who wrote an article in leftist rag Mother Jones magazine…

An opposite effect was seen when some poor Hmong schmuck in St Paul tried to argue, in broken English, that his driving over and killing a pedestrian was due to a faulty acccelerator. The jury didn’t believe him and sent him to prison. A year or two later it came out that the accident was indeed Toyota’s fault, and he was released.

Ralph Nader made a lot of enemies by taking on the Corvair. But of the VW Beetle, he said you couldn’t have designed a more dangerous car. That was hip, though, so not worth tackling.

George Lois, a prominent Madison Avenue adman of Greek descent, lauded Doyle Dane Bernbach’s “Think Small” campaign for its ability to sell “a Nazi car in a Jewish town”.

Once you discount for the seasonal variation…

Spring arrived late in the Great Lakes states this year. Seasonal variation itself can vary.

I’m sorry, where did the bad F150 man touch you?

Have you talked to your therapist about this fantasy of yours?

The alleged defect was a tendency to catch fire in a rear end collision. What you described doesn’t sound anything like that.

I don’t feel like looking it up, so I’m going on memory, but wasn’t there a rear end collision where a Pinto was hit from behind and went up like a Zippo lighter. It was a guy and his mother. I think the mom burned to death and the son lived, if you can call it that, but was horrifically burnt over his whole body.

I remember reading somewhere than then-Ford president Lee Iacocca insisted on keeping the weight down in an attempt at fuel economy, so that’s why the car was so flimsy. Iacocca was always big on stupid slogans, probably because there are so many stupid people, and the gimmick with this car was that the Pinto was under 2,000 pounds in weight and under 2,000 dollars in price.

No. As I have correctly stayed before,

Well, if you stay so, it must be true. Because you correctly stayed it.

Support for this stayment? “Experts stay” perhaps?

Oh, my god, GREAT comeback! He had you on the ropes with actual footage of the fall of Chicago and THEN out of nowhere you pull a 60 year old poster of a B-movie motorbike exploitation flick out of your ass! Why does anyone ever even think of messing with you, Anon? Fools!

LOL!

Hey, the pathetic part is that I knew there were car movies like that, but I couldn’t think of the titles, in my old age.

The point is that art imitates life, and a bunch of Manhattan Jews didn’t pull the inspiration for those young-men-car-angst movies from their rear ends.

Yes there were a few accidents of that nature. They sold something like 1.5 million Pintos so there were a few unfortunate accidents. The point was that the Pinto was in reality no better and no worse than any car of that era in regard to catching fire in a rear end collision, it’s just that the Pinto was seized upon by the press (and trial lawyers).

Cars in those days were all unsafe by modern standards but the Pinto met the legal standards of the time. Cars today weigh a lot more (and cost a lot more) because the current standards require them to be reinforced all over the place. Maybe modern cars are safer but the average new car now costs \$40k and is unaffordable to many. A friend in college had a Pinto and I had a Maverick (which was equally lightly built) and we both survived somehow.

Not fantasy, reality. The murderer was white. He drove a truck.

https://www.denverpost.com/2021/11/12/ronald-troyke-arvada-shooting-gunman/amp/

I’m going on memory too…

… the “exploding Pintos” had their gas tanks between the rear axle & the rear bumper, not good in rear end collisions. Tanks in front of the rear axle are much safer.

As for Iacocca — when he “rescued” Chrysler he got government protection from the clearly superior Japanese auto industry, which he whined about having an “uneven playing field.”

He pompously sloganeered about buying American — and all the while he was quietly importing Mitsubishis and slapping Dodge Colt nameplates on them.

“Badge engineering” is pathetic, but even more pathetic is the fact that it works.

Ok, well, in the future, may I suggest using the Eat My Dust movie poster featuring a demonic Howdy Doody-looking Ron Howard in a Confederate battle cap laughing insanely at the recent memory of his flying funny car corkscrewing two hapless police cruisers? I’ll take your word for it that Roger Corman didn’t pull this tale entirely out of his ass, but I’m curious–what orifice did it come from?

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074454/mediaviewer/rm2830317824/?ref_=tt_ov_i

That Dodge Colts were made in Japan was no secret. It was right there on the sticker.

The US industry had been doing captive imports on compact cars since the early ’50s. The Nash Metropolitan was assembled in the UK by Austin. The unionized wage structure in the US made it unprofitable to produce small cars. The amount of labor needed to screw together a small car is not that much less than the labor needed to put together a big one but the price is a lot less.

Chrysler started bringing in a large # of small cars from Mitsubishi of Japan starting in the 1970s – they also owned part of Mitsubishi.

That Dodge Colts were made in Japan was no secret. It was right there on the sticker.

I said Iacocca “pompously sloganeered about buying American — and all the while he was quietly [not “secretly”] importing Mitsubishis and slapping Dodge Colt nameplates on them.”

In all his swaggering cheap shots at the Japanese he never uttered a peep about buying Japanese himself. And likely few Dodge Colt owners ever thought twice about it, which is how advertising works.

No doubt.

I do remember the Mitsubishi thing. Iacocca was a flim flam man from way back. He took credit for other peoples’ ideas and denied/downplayed the failures he caused. He also developed a massive ego. His last years at Ford were not pretty. It’s hard to feel sorry for an Olympic class arsehole like Henry Ford II, but Iacocca’s antics did the trick.

I remember some goober I knew praising Iacocca to the skies. I asked him why he thought so highly of him.

He read his autobiography. That was it. He had never heard of him before that.

People like that are why flim flam works.

So burly!