America's Safest Cars Aren't American

You are so right....I'm sitting here on a cold December afternoon, thinking how much I want another convertible.

If you are young, male and unfortunate enough to live in a high insurance premium state, you may want to look at IIHS experience-based ratings. These are based on theft incidence, repair cost, likelihood of an accident, etc. The inscos care about one thing - retaining the maximum % of your premium payments, so these ratings are pretty informative. But it does lead to things like top ratings for 'vettes and Porkers that are weekend driven by old guys like me. OTOH, the low ratings for pick'em ups driven like they were 'vettes seem to be correct.

When I was single and 20, I almost ended up with a Lotus Elan. Then I looked at the frame and decided I didn't want to die. Nonetheless, I was fine with driving a 1993 Escort (in retrospect, it was probably as bad as the Elan would have been) and almost-but-not-quite drove an '85 Porsche 944, and then daily drove a 1995 Mercury Mystique for quite a while. When I had my son, though, my priority did become safety - not on ratings, per se, but on my own best judgment of safety for my kid (eg, rear side curtain airbags don't matter too much when your kid's in a center car seat). On a personal level, I decided that if I saved a few K, or got a slightly more fun car, at the known cost of safety, and something happened, I wouldn't be able to live with myself. However slight the chance of it making a difference, I just want to know that I couldn't have done any better for the money and given other tradeoffs. As it happens, the car I ended up with is a Saab 9-5, which is comfortable as hell, under 7 seconds to 60, has far more luxo-stuff per price than anything else, is big enough to hold various child accouterments, and looks pretty good sitting on fat 17" tires. It's doubtful I could have gotten anything as nice for the price anyway, even without safety, so I'm pretty happy. (Oh, and because they're driven by people like college deans, insurance is damn cheap. Comp, collision, and $100 deductible for 600-something a year... at least, for a 32 year old married guy with a son.)