OH and you completly blew off the lowered standards of vehicle manufacturing for government requirements which has brought more injuries and deaths in vehicles than cell phones ever will. You are saying that the same government that demands cars be built from coke cans is concerned about safety? It’s about REVENUE! More revenue tools. Get it?
You are completely wrong. Even the crappiest, cheapest car in the US sold today is FAR safer than the largest, most expensive car of 20 years, 30 years, 40 years, 50 years, any number of years that you want ago. Everyone seems to forget that those “big cars” of the 50’s and 60’s were mostly air - no side beams in the doors, two sheets of metal about as thick as that on a refrigerator door between you and someone blowing a red light at 50 MPH. Single brake fluid circuits - any leak would cause a total loss of braking. Non-collapsible steering columns that would impale the driver when the steering wheel bent. Metal dashboards that would kill the occupants by splitting their heads open (but the good news was that the CAR could be repaired)! Non-laminated glass that would neatly decapitate the occupants as their heads went through the windshield (no seat belts to hold them back). I could go on. Cars are designed to be sacrificial these days. Repairing or replacing (the financial value of) a person costs society and insurance companies MUCH more.
I also think that “old timers” have very fuzzy memories about how much maintenance and repair that older cars took as opposed to today’s cars. I will grant that the maintenance was potentially easier to do, but tuning up a car every 6-12000 miles was not unusual at all 40 years ago. For example, if you really wanted your car to run well back then, you adjusted and cleaned your car’s ignition points every 3000 miles.