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I guess given the color, this was a city cop car and not a highway patrol car. What I heard (which might not be reliable at all) was that beat cop cars spend huge amounts of time idling at a dead stop, so the odometer reading can be a bit misleading (e.g., there's a lot more wear on the engine then you might expect). Whereas highway patrol cars put a lot more highway miles on the odo (for obvious reasons) and so you get high mile cars which are actually in much better condition. In any case you can't ask for a car with wider parts availability. Mileage will suck but you're a city dweller so you probably don't put that much miles on a car. Probably the only drawback is parking it in the city since it's kind of big.
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Mar 1, 2013 06:41
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kimbo305 posted:There's no two ways about it -- newer-designed cars are simply safer. I just want to elaborate on this because it's still not very clear from your links: Safety standards go up all the time. If you look at an older car's safety rating, it's generally set based on the contemporary standards; so, a car that got an A rating in 1990 is nowhere near as safe as a car that got a B rating in 2010. It's very difficult to find basic grading-type numbers that allow you to compare across different generations of vehicles. This should be obvious, if you think about it: in 1990 almost no cars had airbags beyond maybe a driver and passenger front-impact airbag, usually as options. Today, airbags are standard and most cars have side-impact airbags too. That's just an immediately-obvious example, but it goes on, including things like high-strength bars in the doors and pillars, increased standards for pedestrian-impact, the advent of backup warning sensors/cameras, etc. It's also the case that newer cars have better-performing suspensions and tires, which make avoiding an accident more likely, which improves safety in a way not measured by tests that focus on performance in an impact. Even the panthers re-designed after 2006, and the models sold in 2010 with standard side-impact airbags etc., still had the same old frame, which you can see in kimbo's fourth link was rated as "poor" by the standards of 2009-10. So this: sports posted:Panther-body cars are the safest cars to come out of North America. They are incredible- near comparable to a Volvo in every way. is just totally wrong. Maybe they were the safest when they were brand new (in 1979), but now even the ones made up through 2011 were already basically obsolete in terms of core safety technologies, and almost any car designed and built to conform to US standards in the last five or ten years is safer. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 21:25 on Mar 19, 2013 |
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Mar 19, 2013 21:20
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sports posted:Yes, because a car that you can't see out of the back window with is really safe. Actually this is a good point, and I kind of wish car safety ratings included a factor based on nationwide statistical data about frequency and severity of accidents. Because there are a lot of car features that aren't measured by safety standards bodies; in particular, the ability of the car to facilitate the driver's avoidance of an accident (beyond braking performance, which is measured), which would include maneuverability, visibility, active and passive warning systems, lighting, and so on. Obviously this cannot work for a new model, since there'd be no data to base it on. And, it could be very difficult to control for driver demographics and regional differences (cars mostly owned by younger people might be in more accidents than those mostly owned by middle-aged people; cars used more in snowy/icy conditions might have more accidents than cars people don't drive in those conditions; cars affected by excessive rusting rates in road-salt areas might perform worse than cars mostly used in non-rusty areas whose components are not prone to rust; and so on). Panther cars were among the most popular fleet vehicles ever made, of course, including obviously among police cars. This could skew statistics wildly in their favor even if you exclude accidents that occur while a car is a cop car... because everyone drives more safely when a Panther car is in view? On the other hand, a ton of Panther-platform cars were used as taxis, and those see a lot more use on the road, but then again taxi drivers might be more experienced and therefore avoid accidents better, and also mostly drive within cities where accidents are at lower speeds and thus less severe... So in the end, I think all you can do is go with the safety test results and the rest is personal anecdotes and arguments without useful data to back them up.
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Mar 19, 2013 21:57
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