Every physical element of Edison’s 1877 tinfoil phonograph was within reach

Monday, September 15th, 2025

What’s the earliest someone could have made a phonograph if they’d understood the basic principles involved? Quite early, ChatGPT says:

A screw-cutting lathe drawn in 1483 shows that late-medieval instrument makers already had a leadscrew, treadle/hand-crank drive, and slide rest accurate enough to carry a stylus slowly along a rotating cylinder.

With beeswax — ubiquitous and soft enough to take fine impressions — and thin metal or animal-skin diaphragms coupled to a simple horn, every physical element of Edison’s 1877 tinfoil phonograph was within reach; nothing required steam power, electricity, or metallurgical advances later than the 15th century. Wax itself was later used in commercial cylinders.

So, had someone grasped the “vibrate-stylus-in-groove” idea, a crude yet understandable recorder-player could have been built in Western Europe around the end of the 15th century — almost four centuries before Edison.

Posted in Science, Technology | 5 Comments »

The world’s largest illegal sports streaming platform was raided in the Giza Governorate of Egypt

Sunday, September 14th, 2025

Streameast, the world’s largest illegal sports streaming platform, with 1.6 billion views over the last year, has been shut down after a global collaboration between Europol, the U.S. Department of Justice, Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, and National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Centre:

Last weekend’s raid in the Giza Governorate of Egypt led to two arrests and the seizure of laptops, smartphones, cash, credit cards, crypto, real estate properties, and evidence of a money-laundering network.

Posted in Crime | 1 Comment »

The company is able to produce each episode for $1 or less

Saturday, September 13th, 2025

Inception Point AI is attempting to build a stable of AI talent to host podcasts :

“We believe that in the near future half the people on the planet will be AI, and we are the company that’s bringing those people to life,” said CEO Jeanine Wright, who was previously chief operating officer of podcasting company Wondery, which has recently had to reorganize under the changing podcast landscape.

The company is able to produce each episode for $1 or less, depending on length and complexity, and attach programmatic advertising to it. This generally means that if about 20 people listen to that episode, the company made a profit on that episode, without factoring in overhead.

Inception Point AI already has more than 5,000 shows across its Quiet Please Podcast Network and produces more than 3,000 episodes a week. Collectively, the network has seen 10 million downloads since September 2023. It takes about an hour to create an episode, from coming up with the idea to getting it out in the world.

The company produces different levels of podcasts. The lowest level involves weather reports for various geographic areas or simple biographies and higher levels involving subject-area podcasts hosted by one of about 50 AI personalities they’ve created, including food expert Claire Delish, gardener and nature expert Nigel Thistledown and Oly Bennet, who covers off-beat sports.

As for how it stacks up against human podcasts? “I think that people who are still referring to all AI-generated content as AI slop are probably lazy luddites. Because there’s a lot of really good stuff out there,” Wright said.

[…]

The idea behind the company came after Corbin accidentally developed a hit podcast during the pandemic in which he read daily CDC reports, and then branched out into weather reports and other shows that took off, including A Moment of Silence (an actual minute of silence). At the time, they were not using AI.

Posted in Media, Technology | 3 Comments »

Animated by spirits, angels, demons, and gods

Friday, September 12th, 2025

In earlier ages, Matt Larsen notes, people spoke of the world as animated by spirits, angels, demons, and gods:

These were not only articles of belief but also ways of explaining lived experience. To say someone was gripped by a “spirit of rage” or that a village had fallen under an “evil spirit” was not necessarily to describe a literal creature lurking in the shadows. It was to recognize that certain moods, desires, and collective energies can take hold of people with a force that feels external, powerful, and beyond their control.

Modern culture often makes light of these concepts. We are taught to think of spirits as superstition, anthropomorphic gods as primitive projections, and demons as nothing more than fairy tales. Yet in stripping away the old language, we may also lose track of the deeper truths those metaphors carried.

[…]

Even if we no longer picture spirits as winged beings or malicious shades, we still intuitively understand the idea of “team spirit” or a “spirit of rebellion.” These are forces that animate individuals and groups, shifting their behavior, inspiring courage, or driving them to defiance. In modern psychological terms, we might speak of emotional contagion, group dynamics, or personality traits. But such language lacks the vitality of saying that someone is “possessed by pride” or that a crowd is filled with the “spirit of joy.”

Older ways of speaking recognized that ideas, moods, and motivations often act on us like external powers. They invade us, take hold of us, and drive us toward actions we may not have chosen in cold reason. To frame these forces as “spirits” was not naïve but perceptive. It was a way of acknowledging that human beings are never only rational, that unseen forces, whether internal passions or cultural moods, move us like tides.

Modern psychology has replaced the language of spirits with the language of cognition, drives, and archetypes. But in doing so, it has lost something of the vividness and immediacy of the older metaphors. To say that someone is in the grip of an “evil spirit” captures the lived experience of being overcome by destructive emotion far more directly than to diagnose them with “maladaptive behavioral tendencies.”

Posted in Policy | 4 Comments »

Dietary fiber is extremely heterogeneous

Thursday, September 11th, 2025

Dietary fiber is extremely heterogeneous, so a recent study analyzed the impact of different plant-based fibers (pectin, ?-glucan, wheat dextrin, resistant starch, and cellulose as a control) on the gut microbiota in high-fat diet (HFD)-fed mice:

Only ?-glucan supplementation during HFD-feeding decreased adiposity and body weight gain and improved glucose tolerance compared with HFD-cellulose, whereas all other fibers had no effect. This was associated with increased energy expenditure and locomotor activity in mice compared with HFD-cellulose. All fibers supplemented into an HFD uniquely shifted the intestinal microbiota and cecal short-chain fatty acids; however, only ?-glucan supplementation increased cecal butyrate concentrations. Lastly, all fibers altered the small-intestinal microbiota and portal bile acid composition.

Beta-glucan is found in a number of foods:

  • Oats: Whole oats, oat bran, and oatmeal are among the best sources, with about 1-2 grams of beta-glucan per 100 grams.
  • Barley: Whole barley and barley products like barley flour contain 2-8 grams per 100 grams.
  • Mushrooms: Certain varieties, such as shiitake, maitake, reishi, and oyster mushrooms, are rich in beta-glucans, particularly in their cell walls.
  • Yeast: Nutritional yeast and baker’s yeast contain beta-glucans, often used in supplements or fortified foods.
  • Seaweed: Some types, like laminarin-containing brown seaweed, provide beta-glucans.
  • Rye and Wheat: Whole grain rye and wheat contain smaller amounts of beta-glucan compared to oats and barley.

Or you can buy it as a supplement.

Posted in Fitness, Science | No Comments »

He’s no good to me dead

Wednesday, September 10th, 2025

Ryan Williamson explains how to murder an icon in seven episodes:

Let’s start with what made Boba Fett legendary in the first place. In The Empire Strikes Back, he appears in maybe ten minutes of screen time, speaks perhaps twenty words, and yet became one of the most beloved characters in the entire saga. How? Because those ten minutes were perfect.

Fett didn’t need exposition. He didn’t need backstory. He didn’t need to explain his motivations or philosophy of leadership. He was pure, distilled competence wrapped in battered armor. When Vader warns him “no disintegrations,” we immediately understand this isn’t a man who asks polite questions. When he tracks the Millennium Falcon to Cloud City while Imperial Star Destroyers fail, we see tactical brilliance in action. When he goes toe-to-toe with Luke Skywalker and nearly wins, we witness lethal skill.

Most importantly, he was economical. Every movement deliberate. Every word weighted. “He’s no good to me dead” tells you everything about his priorities, professionalism, and pragmatic worldview in six syllables. That’s masterful character work.

The mystique was everything. Fett represented the dangerous unknown—a wild card who operated by his own rules in a galaxy dominated by the Empire and Rebellion’s grand ideologies. He was the shark in the water, glimpsed but never fully revealed.

The Book of Boba Fett took that mystique and fed it through a wood chipper. Then set the wood chipper on fire. Then tossed the whole mess into deep space with a trebuchet.

Gone was the economical dialogue, replaced by endless speeches about ruling “with respect” instead of fear. Gone was the aura of quiet menace, replaced by a surprisingly chatty crime boss who felt compelled to explain his every decision. Gone was the tactical brilliance, replaced by a leader who seemed perpetually surprised by obvious betrayals and threats.

Most damaging of all, Disney made him safe. The man who once disintegrated people without hesitation became someone who agonized over moral choices. The predator became prey, constantly reacting to threats instead of eliminating them. The professional became an amateur, learning on the job how to run a criminal organization.

This wasn’t character development—it was character assassination.

Posted in Media | 5 Comments »

Venice’s famous winged lion statue is actually Chinese

Tuesday, September 9th, 2025

The bronze statue of the symbol of the Venetian republic, a winged lion, that stands atop a column in the Piazzetta adjoining St. Mark’s Square may be Chinese:

After studying samples from the metal lion using lead isotope analysis, researchers from northern Italy’s University of Padua found that the copper used to create the bronze alloy (which is a mix of copper and tin) on the original bronze work came from the Yangtze river in China, according to a study published in the journal Antiquity on Thursday.

This, they said, would explain why the 4-meter- (13-foot-) long and 2.2-meter- (7-foot-) high statue, previously thought to have been made locally, in Syria or Anatolia, is stylistically mysterious.

Lion of St. Mark in Venice

Although it was installed in St. Mark’s Square in the 13th century, the lion more closely resembles work produced in China during the Tang Dynasty — 618 to 907 AD — than that found in medieval Mediterranean Europe, the researchers argue, citing the shape of its snout and scars from the removal of earlier horns.

The column on which the lion stands is from Anatolia (part of modern-day Turkey), and the lion itself has been repaired several times, with the earliest recorded instance in 1293.

“It is possible that Marco Polo’s father and uncle, during the four years they spent at the court of Kublai Khan during their first journey, were responsible for the acquisition of the sculpture,” the researchers said, adding that the visit likely took place between 1264 and 1268.

Zhenmushou from Tang Dynasty

The animal was originally a zhènmùshòu, a monumental, fierce, lion-like tomb guardian from the Tang Dynasty, the authors speculate.

Posted in Science | 2 Comments »

Hyperactivity in the brain’s reticular thalamic nucleus may drive autism-like behaviors

Monday, September 8th, 2025

Scientists at Stanford have found that hyperactivity in the brain’s reticular thalamic nucleus may drive autism-like behaviors:

In the new study, the researchers recorded the neural activity of this brain region in mice while observing the animals’ behavior. In mice that had been genetically modified to model autism (Cntnap2 knockout mice), the reticular thalamic nucleus showed elevated activity when the animals encountered stimuli like light or an air puff as well as during social interactions. The brain region also showed bursts of spontaneous activity, causing seizures.

Epilepsy is much more prevalent in people with autism than in the general population — 30% versus 1% — though the mechanisms are not well understood. Recognizing this connection, the researchers tested an experimental seizure drug, Z944, and found that it reversed behavioral deficits in the autism mouse model.

With a different experimental treatment that genetically modifies neurons to respond to designer drugs, known as DREADD-based neuromodulation, the researchers could suppress overactivity in the reticular thalamic nucleus and reverse behavioral deficits in the autism mouse model. They could even induce these behavioral deficits in normal mice by ramping up activity in the reticular thalamic nucleus.

Posted in Science | No Comments »

No one improved their reading skills at all

Sunday, September 7th, 2025

The real data on education is more than bad enough, Max Tabarrok says, to merit removing or reforming the Department of Education:

Inflation adjusted spending per pupil tripled since 1970 while reading scores haven’t budged.

There has also been an astounding amount of credential inflation. The amount of time people spend in school has increased by more than three years since the 1970s as more people graduate high school and college, but performance on tests of skill or human capital is completely stagnant.

This suggests, a la Bryan Caplan’s Case against education, that many of these extra years of schooling are actually a socially inefficient zero-sum competition where it pays individually to get the most schooling and come out on top of your peers, but everyone would be better off if people invested less time and money in competing. Hundred billion dollar subsidies to student loans and higher education institutions have exacerbated this zero-sum race for little material gain.

Evidence for this: The NCES ran two rounds of a literacy test, one in 1992 and one in 2003. The overall average score on the test didn’t change (276 vs 275 out of 500), but within every educational attainment group scores dropped massively.

High school dropouts got less literate on average because the highest scoring dropouts in the 90s became the lowest scoring graduates in the 2000s as standards were lowered and more students were pushed through into more education. Literacy scores among Graduate degree holders dropped by 13-17 points in a decade. If a graduate degree cannot even teach you how to read, it’s probably not having large effects on any other more complex forms of human capital.

This means that across this decade of rising educational attainment, no one improved their reading skills at all. Instead, the standards for graduating from each level of schooling were just lowered and people spent more years slogging through high school or college.

Posted in Economics, Education, Policy | 1 Comment »

80,000 cameras pointed at highways and parking lots

Saturday, September 6th, 2025

Since its founding in 2017, Flock, which was valued at $7.5 billion in its most recent funding round, has quietly built a network of more than 80,000 cameras pointed at highways and parking lots across the U.S.:

Growth has been explosive, with revenue up some 70% from the estimated $175 million it booked in 2023. It’s not yet profitable and has no imminent plan to be as it prioritizes growth, backed by a $275 million March funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz. Those numbers were more than sufficient to land Flock on Forbes’ 2025 Cloud 100 list of the top private cloud computing companies. Langley says turning Flock into a $100 billion business is “very within reach.” Ilya Sukhar, an early investor and partner at VC firm Matrix who sits on Flock’s board, agrees. “It’s a bit cliché, but it does feel like we’re just getting started,” he says. “It’s not hard for me to project to a place where we get to that level.”

Each Flock license plate reader cam costs between $3,000 and $3,500, with an additional fee for FlockOS, the operating system that makes all the data Flock collects accessible via a browser or a mobile app, based on either the number of users or cameras. Dunwoody PD, for instance, pays around $500,000 annually for its array of 105 cameras, gunshot detectors, that skittering DJI drone and the software that controls it all.

Flock’s growth isn’t solely fueled by its 5,000 law enforcement customers across 49 states (it hasn’t yet installed its cameras in Alaska). It has 1,000 corporate customers, including blue chips like FedEx, Lowe’s and Simon Property, America’s largest mall owner. Then there are housing and homeowner associations, small businesses, schools and organizations like the Jewish Federation of Greater Atlanta, which has installed 64 Flock cameras across different properties in the city, including a community center that has reported a recent spike in antisemitic threats to Dunwoody police. All these customers can choose to grant the police access to their camera feeds, further expanding the surveillance coverage Flock can offer law enforcement. Many do.

Langley had no experience in police tech when he and fellow Georgia Tech alums Matt Feury, 36, and Paige Todd, 40, started the company in 2017. Previously they’d worked together on an app Langley cofounded for upgrading sports or concert seats to VIP-status events, where Feury and Todd were early employees. (It was acquired by Atlanta-based conglomerate Cox Enterprises and no longer exists.) Inspired by an unsolved robbery in Langley’s neighborhood, the trio started work on the first Flock prototype, an Android phone camera in a waterproof box that took pictures of cars and picked out license plates that could then be searched via an app.

Posted in Business, Policy, Technology | 1 Comment »

Face to Face with Death in Mosul

Friday, September 5th, 2025

Matt Larsen shares the story of Staff Sergeant Paul McCully finding himself face to face with death in Mosul:

I wasn’t sure what had happened, I just knew I was laid out on my stomach, and I couldn’t feel my hands or legs. I could hear Owens screaming, and I was checking myself to see if I was physically intact when another explosion went off, a hand grenade, but it wasn’t as loud as the first one. I felt the shrapnel impact my helmet but was still in a daze and confused as to what was going on. Then I felt something that seemed to be tapping my helmet and everything sounded muffled. My initial thought was that it was my guys pulling me out of there, but when I looked up, everything came back to me, sound, reality, cleared vision. There was a bad guy standing over me.

I was looking up at him and expecting him to unload his AK47 on me, but he was screaming and butt-stroking me in the head. The second I realized that it wasn’t my guys, I got up as fast as I could and grabbed his AK muzzle with my right hand and his shirt on his right shoulder with my left hand. I don’t even remember placing my hands on the ground to push myself up; it just seemed like I floated up, that’s how fast it happened.

After I grabbed him and his weapon, I was jerking it in an outward motion but making sure to keep the muzzle away from me. After what seemed to be two or three seconds, I got the AK out of his hands and on the ground to the right of me a couple of feet. I had finally jerked it free, and it went flying. He tried to dive for the AK, but I grabbed him and went to the Thai clinch with him to control him. A Thai clinch is when you control a person’s upper body by placing both your hands behind his neck. Our bodies were close together; I had his hair in my right hand, pushing his head down, and my left hand was controlling his left shoulder. I immediately started throwing right uppercuts and knees to [mess] him up. I did that because I thought that there were more of my own guys behind me, but it turns out that Owens and I were the only ones to make it outside before the initial explosion. The No. 3 and No. 4 men got blown back into the building.

After I threw the blows, I held on to him with the shirt and hair and extended my arms to allow the guys who I thought were behind me to have a clear shot. But that never happened. It seemed like I was alone, and nobody was there to help me. He was screaming “Allahu akbar” and I was yelling “Fuck You” and continued to hit him as he was struggling to get to his weapon. Owens came running up to me with his pistol drawn. He had lost his M4 rifle in the blast also, so he pulled his M9 pistol.

He came up to my right side, right next to me so he wouldn’t shoot me in the struggle. Right as he fired one shot into the enemy’s stomach, the enemy had reached up and grabbed Owen’s pistol. At that moment I let go and took a step back and secured my M4. Owens had swung him around to the left, which put him right in front of me.

With Owens and the bad guy fighting for Owen’s M9, I put the barrel of my rifle in the bad guy’s right side, point-blank, right underneath his armpit, and fired a single shot. He squealed like a pig and hit the ground like a sack of shit, landing on his back. I immediately placed the barrel of my rifle in his face and fired ten shots to finish him. All of this happened within a matter of about 20 seconds, but seemed like forever.

Posted in Martial Arts, War | No Comments »

The modern battlefield requires split-second decision-making, seamless coordination among distributed teams, and processing vast amounts of information, all under extreme pressure

Thursday, September 4th, 2025

The modern battlefield requires split-second decision-making, seamless coordination among distributed teams, and processing vast amounts of information, all under extreme pressure:

As I have learned over the last year, as an advisor to August Interactive, a gaming studio, these are exactly the skills that well-designed military gaming programs can develop and refine.

Unlike traditional military wargaming — which typically involves structured, turn-based exercises on maps or models to explore campaign plans and strategic concepts — the gaming discussed here draws heavily on digital interactive platforms, including modified commercial titles and purpose-built military simulations. These environments — ranging from real-time strategy games to tactical shooters, flight simulators, and cyber-themed games — emphasize rapid continuous decision-making, high-pressure coordination, and immersive skill development. While both approaches aim to sharpen judgment and prepare leaders for complex scenarios, this form of military gaming leverages the speed, interactivity, and scale of modern gaming technology to cultivate competencies that are difficult to replicate in traditional wargaming formats. And they are also more engaging and fun, which is a good thing.

The U.S. military should formally embrace and invest in advanced digital gaming as a core training tool, leveraging its ability to build critical cognitive, coordination, and technical skills for modern warfare.

[…]

I visited the gaming center at West Point last spring. I was impressed with the setup and technological capabilities, but I was even more impressed by the insights shared with me by combat-experienced officers and non-commissioned officers overseeing the program. The positive impact on cadet leadership development was remarkable: improved communication skills, quicker decision-making, and faster adaptability to change. Notably, many intercollegiate athletes there are involved in military gaming.

Posted in Games, Technology, War | 7 Comments »

Is modernism due to youth culture?

Wednesday, September 3rd, 2025

Robin Hanson has been puzzling over the transition from traditional to modern culture:

It happened after tech started changing a lot, when long distance trade, travel, and talk greatly increased. But with a big delay; those things had changed lots a few centuries before culture started changing fast ~1900-1920. And strangely, the new modernists were then most sure that the culture of their grandparents was not what they wanted, even though they felt quite unsure of in which new directions culture should go.

Clothing fashion had been changing for several centuries before, and there had also been slowly changing fashion in governance and morals. But suddenly art, sculpture, architecture, music fashion changed much more radically, and soon after norms and values also started changing faster.

At the key transition time, it seems that the culture of elite youth was more modern than the culture of older adults. And even today, most people most like the food, music, etc. popular when they were ~20yo, suggesting youth have a disproportionate role in cultural change. And elites have always had more influence over most everything.

All of these lead me to wonder if a key was the rise of school, which concentrated elite youths together so that they could form their own internal elite youth culture.

Posted in Education, Policy | 8 Comments »

Should we have kept the American Empire?

Tuesday, September 2nd, 2025

Should we have kept the American Empire?, Max Tabarrok asks:

Note that the question of whether the US should have relinquished its maximum territorial extent is different than the one facing America in 1865 or the question of expanding American borders today. There, you have to consider the substantial costs of actually conquering territory in war. Holding on to land already conquered is less costly than conquering anew.

[…]

The first thing to notice when considering this question is that America did not actually give up all of its imperial conquests. Hawaii, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, a smattering of pacific islands, Alaska, and arguably even much of the American Southwest are spoils of conquest or purchase.

No one seriously considers giving up any of the pieces of our imperial history that we kept. The Hawaiian independence movement is perhaps the most popular, but that sets a low upper bound. This acceptance of the pieces of empire we retained suggests that if we had kept more of our 1918 peak territory, people would accept those additional pieces just as easily today.

Reluctance to give up what we kept isn’t just status quo bias. The economic performance of the states and territories still within the US compared to the nations we once controlled but are independent today is evidence that American annexation has large positive effects.

[…]

Integration under the same national umbrella seems like about the only way to sustain and spread free trade and immigration. The US can’t even manage it with Canada. The principal domestic supporters of Philippine independence, for example, were American farmers who didn’t want to face competition from tariff-free Filipino sugar, and nativists who didn’t want immigration from “alien races.”

A final general argument is, perhaps surprisingly, political legitimacy. The nations that America was closest to annexing are not only economic underperformers, they also tend to be undemocratic and authoritarian. Recently, Panama and the Dominican Republic are probably exceptions here with relatively successful and stable governance.

Posted in Economics, Policy, War | 3 Comments »

Latest driver death rates highlight dangers of muscle cars

Monday, September 1st, 2025

The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety has been calculating driver death rates approximately every three years since 1989, and also calculated the best and worst models according to the number of drivers in other vehicles killed in crashes with them on its last study:

Six of the 21 vehicles with the highest driver death rates for model year 2020 are variants of the Chevrolet Camaro, Dodge Challenger, Dodge Charger and Ford Mustang, while eight others are small cars or minicars. Eighteen of the 23 vehicles with the lowest driver death rates are minivans or SUVs, and 12 are luxury vehicles.

“We typically find that smaller vehicles have high driver death rates because they don’t provide as much protection, especially in crashes with larger, heavier SUVs and pickups,” said IIHS President David Harkey. “The muscle cars on this list highlight that a vehicle’s image and how it is marketed can also contribute to crash risk.”

That might not be how I’d phrase it.

But three Dodge muscle cars with excessively high driver death rates also rank among the worst performers when it comes to other-driver deaths, suggesting these vehicles are driven in an aggressive manner.

Seven of the 20 vehicles with the highest other-driver death rates are large or very large pickups, and four more are midsize SUVs — categories that aren’t represented among the models with the worst track record for protecting their own drivers. Seven of the vehicles with the highest other-driver death rates also rank among the worst for driver death rates: the Dodge Challenger two-wheel-drive, Dodge Charger two-wheel-drive, Dodge Charger HEMI two-wheel-drive, Kia Forte, Kia Optima, Kia Rio sedan and Nissan Altima.

The list of vehicles with the lowest other-driver death rates include two small, two midsize and one large car, as well as six small and 10 midsize SUVs. Ten models are luxury vehicles.

The rates include only driver deaths because all vehicles on the road have drivers, but not all of them have passengers or the same number of passengers. The number of deaths is derived from the federal Fatality Analysis Reporting System. Registration data come from IHS Markit.

The latest rates are based on fatalities that occurred from 2018 to 2021 for vehicles from the 2020 model year, as well as earlier models with the same designs and features. The numbers represent the estimated risks for 2020 models, but the data include models from as far back as 2017 if the vehicles have not been substantially redesigned over the intervening period. Including these older, equivalent vehicles makes the sample size larger and therefore increases the reliability of the results. To be included, a vehicle must have had at least 100,000 registered vehicle years of exposure from 2018 to 2021 or at least 20 deaths.

[…]

The lists of vehicles with the lowest driver and other-driver death rates have nine models in common. These include the Acura MDX four-wheel-drive, Audi Q5 four-wheel-drive, Chevrolet Traverse four-wheel-drive, Lexus RX 350 four-wheel-drive, Mercedes-Benz E-Class sedan four-wheel-drive, Porsche Macan, Subaru Ascent, Toyota C-HR and Volvo XC60 four-wheel-drive. Notably, six of those are luxury vehicles.

“The models that rank among the best and worst performers on both lists point to the unfortunate fact that vehicle cost remains a factor in road safety,” Harkey said.

Vehicle cost — or driver income?

Minicars had the highest driver death rates, averaging 153 deaths per million registered vehicle years. Very large luxury cars had the lowest, averaging only 4 deaths. In contrast, very large pickups had the highest other-driver death rates, averaging 121 deaths, while small sports cars had the fewest other-driver deaths, averaging only 11 per million registered vehicle years.

The average other-driver death rate for all 2020 and equivalent models was 53 deaths per million registered vehicle years. There are more other-driver fatalities than driver fatalities because these newer models are more crashworthy than many of their crash counterparts, which come from the wider U.S. fleet, made up of mostly older vehicles.

Driver Deaths Lowest Rates.jpeg
Driver Deaths Highest Rates.jpeg
(Hat tip to Grasspunk.)

Posted in Policy, Technology | 4 Comments »

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