New Car Designs Make Accidents More Likely

You're more likely to get into an accident when driving one of today's new luxury sports cars than older versions of these upscale vehicles, according to a Forbes blog post.

The article, "Design Disasters: Three Ways Cars Are Getting Worse," by Matthew de Paula, who pens the Auto Insider blog for the magazine, reports that high-end vehicles like the BMW 3 Series "have ‘run flat' tires with beefed up sidewalls." These tires are designed to let drivers keep going even when a flat occurs. But apparently there are strange side effects. For instance, when de Paula hit a pothole while driving a BMW, a coffee tumbler was "launched into the air." The tire, however, stayed inflated. "When I got home, I found a two-inch gash right above the edge of the rim," de Paula writes.

Another time, while de Paula was driving an Audi A5, he encountered a sizeable pothole that had been momentarily concealed by the Ford van he was trailing on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway in New York City. Both the driver of the Ford and de Paula tried to avoid the pothole. They both failed. But while the van wasn't impacted by it, the "low-profile rubber on the 18-inch wheel of the Audi A5" completely collapsed.

Apparently, this is the new car designers' idea of safety. "And it's only one of several unfortunate trends in automotive design that are making cars less practical, less comfortable and in some cases less safe," writes de Paula.

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