One day at the Silverstone race track in England, I watched as an American sports car driver named Masten Gregory lost control of his
sports car, and knowing that he was going to hit a grass bank, stood up on the seat. When the car hit, he was thrown over the bank
into a hayfield.

When I reached him, he was on hands and knees. I asked if he were hurt, he said, no not at all, but maybe I could help him find his glasses!

In the fifties, racing drivers didn't want seat belts, they figured that it was safer to be thrown from the car, or at least have the option of
jumping clear. Of course, those days also included drivers who competed in a tweed cap, a busines suit and a bow tie.

Things have changed a bit since then!

Air bags came into being because the Americans wouldn't fasten their seat belts. Compliance in Canada and Europe was over 90%
but in America it was well below 50%.

At one time, in the USA you could not start a car without fastening the seat belt. That issue went to the US Supreme Court as a violation
of individual freedoms and the complainant won.

So air bags were mandated.

The first ones could easily break the neck of a child or small adult, as they did on more than one occasion.
This was because the specification required that the bag deploy fast enough to stop a 200 pound man from going through the
windshield at 50 mph.

That was a disaster, so electronics then prevailed to help establish who is actually in the car and how heavy they are.
(Don't put your heavy briefcase on the passengers seat any more!). 

If a modern upscale car has a crash, the airbag replacement cost can exceed US$14,000, which may precipitate its being scrapped
long before its time is really up.

But "safety" doesn't stop there.

The safety nazis now want braking systems that anticipate what you're going to do before you do it.
Cruise control that takes over when you approach another car too quickly.  
Black boxes that are better at driving than you are and can take control if you mess up.

Since Porsche & Co sell a lot of cars to rich people and realise that being rich doesn't mean you know how to drive, (more likely, from my observations is that the opposite is true), the black box driver in those cars is very sophisticated and expensive.

So it seems that everyone has given up on driver training and is hell bent to install systems that will save you when you might crash
because you dropped your cell phone in your coffee when your lit cigarette dropped into your crotch.

It will help the harassed soccer mom that is putting on her panty hose and spreading butter on toast while she drives the kids to school.
(That's not my imagination at work, one columnist in our local newspaper actually admitted doing just that).

It seems that the ultimate safety item will be a an air bag in the roof that collapses the seats and presses you firmly against the floor
as the car barrel rolls after you fell asleep at the wheel.

Being an ex rally man with an overlay of training from the Jim Russell Racing School, I swear I don't drink, smoke, watch television or
talk on a cell phone while I'm driving. Heck, I don't even turn on the radio. To me, the driving task should be all consuming, using your
peripheral vision to see, out of the corner of your eye, what might be coming at you. And looking as far down the road as possible to
anticipate what other drivers might do next. Which is why most motor cycle riders make dam' good car drivers. Their sense of
anticipation is well honed - for them it's a matter of survival.

And having sat in the shotgun seat and watched the likes of Jim Clark, Denny Hulme and Bruce McLaren make ordinary rental cars
sit up and beg, I know I'm a long way from being as good a driver as I should be.

But I don't feel the need of side airbags. Even though my Mazda3 doesn't have them. If someone comes through an intersection at me,
I can brake, accelerate , or go sideways into the intersection with him. You'll bend some sheet metal, but you won't hurt yourself.
Of course to react that fast you have to have the necessary training.

Which is where my philosophy falls apart: Most people haven't had anywhere NEAR the required level of training.

High school and professional driving schools are a joke.

With all the safety add ons in the worlds, there are still a huge number of older cars out there whose air bag light is on and will never
get repaired and whose ABS light started to glow a long time ago when some garage told the owner he needed a $400 wheel bearing
and its integrated ABS sensor.
"Hell, I drove before ABS was invented and I can do it again now"

So why worry about accident avoidance when I know from personal observation that a huge number of cars on the road right now 
have defective brakes, steering and suspension systems?

The immediate answer?

A yearly safety inspection for every car that's over three years old and a driving test that takes two hours to complete and is very very
severe in its assessment of a drivers ability.

It won't come to pass. Because that answer to road safety is political suicide.

Instead we're going to see more and more speed cameras out in the country (revenue!!!), cars that are in charge of you,
speed sensors on every light standard in town (revenue again!!!) and a general discouragement of driving by governments
everywhere.

And heaven help you if even mention that driving might be FUN, you'll be labeled a pariah right there and then.