Are you a car collector? Perhaps you’ve always loved vintage automobiles. They can be fun to drive, and they give you a connection to the past. Maybe you enjoy working on them or restoring them.
While it is fine to view vintage cars as a hobby, it is also important to remember that they are much more dangerous than modern vehicles. Driving them is always a risk. It increases your chances of suffering from serious injuries or even being fatally injured in an accident.
Why are they so dangerous?
It’s not necessarily that there are problems with vintage cars, but simply that they were built before the development of much safety technology.
For instance, to dissipate the energy in an accident, a modern vehicle will have crumple zones that are designed to crush. But some vintage cars have solid steel frames. This was thought to be safer at the time, but it actually just transfers the energy into the people in the car.
Additionally, many vintage cars lack things that we consider basic safety devices today. An old enough car might not have seatbelts. Most vintage cars do not have airbags. Unless they’ve been upgraded after the fact, none of them have things like blind spot monitoring systems or automatic braking systems. A lot of safety technology has been developed over the last 50 years, so driving a car that is older than that technology increases your risk of injury.
Seeking compensation
Have you been injured in a car accident caused by another driver? Take the time to carefully look into your legal options to seek compensation.