Cars go through two major crash-test batteries: one for the government, and one for a group funded by the insurance industry. As a result of this, we can infer something very important about car safety from the resulting advertisements: cars whose ads talk about how well they do in _government_ crash tests are less safe. The insurance industry has a very powerful incentive to be both honest and accurate about measuring safety in cars. Government bureaucrats, on the other hand, have an incentive to do the minimum possible, and to avoid giving undue offense to the politically powerful. They don’t have to fudge the results to do this…it’s quite adequate to design tests in such a way that they fail to anticipate real world accident conditions. (Trust me, no one who’s read both sets of standards is ever going to take the government’s word about what’s safe.)

It’s not that I trust the insurance business especially…I trust the incentives. The safer my car is, the more likely I’ll spend years paying for insurance without experiencing a single incident which requires my carrier to send anybody a check. The safer my car is, therefore, the more profit my insurance carrier makes off of me. Their proxies in the crash test lab can fairly be expected, therefore, to be fully and properly diligent in measuring risks.

How about someplace north of Phoenix at a higher elevation like, oh, Prescott or Camp Verde or someplace? It wouldn’t be a horrible drive, yet would be cooler in the summer.