"Neil Gould" wrote in message
m...
[...] My first sports car, a 1959 Austin Healy Sprite,
weighed about 1,400 lbs. was wrecked when a Cadillac cut me off and hit me
on a 45º angle driver-side collision front-end when I was doing about 50
mph on a divided roadway. Yet, I suffered no injuries whatsoever. There is
no amount of money that would get me to try that in any typical sedan.

A single incident is not proof. I have met people who swear that it's safer
to not wear a seatbelt, because they know someone who was thrown clear of a
vehicle and suffered only minor injuries.

Beyong that, if you suffered no injuries in that accident at all, it was
just plain dumb luck. Nothing built in 1959 could be considered
"crashworthy" compared to modern designs. Not even race cars.

Weight is not a good predictor of safe construction. But for a given
design, a stronger structure requires more weight. You can disagree with
that all you like, but you'll be wrong the entire time.

I think this is the main factor that differentiates auto and aviation
fatalities. If you only consider accidents above 60 mph, I suspect that
automobiles will look a lot worse compared to aircraft, given that many
aircraft accidents at that speed, such as gear-up landings result in no
serious injuries.

A gear-up landing isn't an accident, any more than scraping a pillar in a
parking garage is. In other words, if you want to count aviation accidents
like that, you need to count all the auto accidents like that as well.

If I'm going to crash into something at 60 mph or higher, I'd much rather do
it in a car than an airplane.

Pete