Is your car worth dying for?

Opinion

In 2011, I was 16 years old when I knew what my first car was going to be.

It had taken months of begging and convincing dad before he agreed to let me buy a car which, at the time, was 35 years old – a MkII Ford Escort. A car built back in 1976; a car he was convinced I had no right to be driving.

“It’s not safe,” he insisted. “It doesn’t have airbags,” he protested.

He was right. At 16, I could hear him, but I wasn’t listening.

Although invented in the 1960s, airbags didn’t take off until well into the 1970s in markets like the USA. Safety systems such as traction control or anti-lock brakes (ABS) came along even later in the 20th Century. Potentially life-saving electronic stability control (ESC) wasn’t mandated in Australian cars until 2011.

No problem, I thought. This car still has a place on the road and by that point, it had a place in my heart.

Fast forward a few months and my ex-spray painter dad was spending his nights and weekends in the backyard with me and the Esky, servicing, painting and bonding.

Nine years on, I feel almost the same about ‘old cars’ as I did then.

I don’t own that Escort anymore. It got rusty and tired, and the prospects of something more comfortable in summer got the better of me.

Once the thrill of the money from the sale wore off, I regretted it. For years, I’ve been relentlessly searching for another – perhaps one with less rust this time.

I’ve got notification settings on for my carsales app so I know when one goes up for sale, and I regularly surf the net for any others floating around.

Naïve you might think, but I’m not ignorant to the fact that cars are some of the most accessible and lethal weapons with which we can arm ourselves.

We know this – but we choose to ignore it and enjoy the pleasures of driving anyway.

As someone who will happily strap themselves into a race car to drive in circles door-to-door at every possible opportunity, I have, perhaps, an irrational fear of having a car crash.

In my race car, I’m safe, protected by layers of fireproof clothing, a helmet that encases my brain, an intricately welded steel cage that surrounds me, and a metal shell that holds it all together.

In a road car, the only thing preventing you from harm is another person’s bad decision.

And it was not until I witnessed a proper road car crash last weekend, that the importance of vehicle safety technologies actually became real to me.

On Saturday, December 5, as my boyfriend and I travelled north on the Pacific Hwy, we watched a driver in a 70 Series Toyota LandCruiser speed pass us at around 140km/h, almost clipping the front of our 20-year-old Daihatsu Move.

The LandCruiser continued down the emergency lane, violently weaving between cars and only coming to a stop once he’d ploughed into at least three other vehicles – ripping an entire front corner off his car in the process.

The impact of the crash sent the contents of the offending Toyota’s tray flying across all three lanes of the highway.

As we later discovered from the police media report, the contents allegedly included around $40,000 in cash, 47kg of cannabis, white powder believed to be cocaine, seven firearms and ammunition. No wonder he was in a hurry.

One of the cars hit was a 2020 Chevrolet Camaro. When we came to a stop behind it, the bright red muscle car sat sideways across the highway in what I can only describe as the sort of scene you expect to see in a movie.

The driver, visibly in shock, was out of the car almost immediately, walking around wondering – like the rest of us – what had happened.

The smell of the scene – a concoction of rubber, leaking oils, fluids and airbag dust – wasn’t foreign to me, but I couldn’t understand how the Camaro driver has remained intact. Or even how he managed to untangle himself from the jungle of airbags dangling from the Chev’s cabin.

That Camaro, like many late-model vehicles, is fitted with multiple airbags, electronic stability and traction control and other handy safety features such as blind spot monitoring and forward collision warning.

But none of that is much competition for a two-tonne ute whose driver would rather risk the lives of everyone around him than stop for a police check.

Australian roads have changed a lot in the last decade. Cars are smarter, thanks to technology that in most cases makes them better ‘drivers’ than the living, breathing piece of meat sitting behind the steering wheel. Hint: you and me.

What we saw was extraordinary. Forget about the police chase, drugs and guns for a second – people make bad decisions and have accidents every day.

Had we been 15 seconds further up the road, we could’ve ended up like that Camaro. But, unlike the man who walked away from that mangled pile of red metal, we – or anyone else in a car without as many (if any) airbags – might not have been lucky enough to survive that day.

I’m not here to discourage driving older vehicles. I love them and I don’t want to see them forced off the road.

All I’m saying is, if you can make the decision today to better protect you and your loved ones in the future by upgrading to a newer car with better safety equipment, I reckon that’s a good decision.

I still want my Ford Escort. But I’ll think twice now about when and where I drive it.