Never Stop Driving #123: Dream or Nightmare?
My automotive sickness is acute, as you’ve likely noticed. This week I even dreamed about my project car. I almost never remember my dreams, but I awoke in a panic Tuesday thinking my Ferrari had been pancaked in a crash.
Nearly four years ago, I found a 1975 Ferrari 308 GT4, the mid-engine sports car Ferrari marketed under the Dino sub brand. I’d aspired to own one for decades. My Dino was rough and hadn’t run in years, which is why I paid only $25K for it. That 25 grand was merely a down payment, because the Dino has required shovelfuls of time and money to get back on the road! Readers of Hagerty Drivers Club magazine—get it here—asked me to document the restoration, which has included two engine rebuilds and two deaths and has turned my hair gray. It’s mostly been a drag of setbacks, which has sorely tested my natural impatience.
Finally, the damn thing is just about finished. Two weeks ago, I went to Munks Motors, a local shop whose talented craftsman finished the interior. Their ace mechanics are also handling a few remaining tasks like re-clamping the CV boot, investigating the rough transition from idle to part throttle, and clearing an obstruction in the brake master cylinder. They’ll finish the car in the next couple of weeks, which is unfortunately right about the time snow typically flies here in Ann Arbor. No matter; my finished Dino will be a helluva Christmas gift, and I’ll set up some chairs in my garage so my friends and I can share a drink and lovingly gaze at the Gandini design while we wait for spring.
My dream earlier this week took me back to mid-2023, when the Dino sat forlornly in a body shop wearing a new paint job and waiting for… I don’t know what. The tires rested on rollers so the car could be moved around. In my dreamscape, the cavernous facility looked more like a parking garage and cars were driving back and forth between parking spaces and paint booths. One of the cars accelerated and T-boned my Ferrari. Don’t ask me to explain this. The massive impact pushed the passenger seat over the center console, and I knew immediately that the car was totaled. My next thought was, oddly, relief, because I knew that I insured the car through Hagerty for $80,000, which meant I’d very soon get most of my money back and be headache free. I was sad, though, as all that work and toil was destroyed. I woke up sweating and later checked on the car just to make sure my dream wasn’t a prediction. As of this writing, it’s still safe.
Some of you will think I’m crazy. Others will understand the pain and joy of a project car. Some of my favorite social-media memes are ones that poke fun at in-process cars that never run, like this one. My colleague Kyle Smith seems to avoid all the project-car mistakes, possibly because he graduated from the automotive restoration program at McPherson College and knows what he’s doing. Unlike me, an untrained, largely clueless DIY diver. Smith recently bought a C4 Corvette that hadn’t run in years, but it quickly sprang to life after a battery charge and appeared to fix itself of its unknown issues, like that Plymouth Fury from the movie Christine. Color me jealous. Smith also shared his tips for keeping a project on track.
Perhaps crashes were on my mind after reading this analysis of National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) crash data. The report draws on the fatality rates of certain models to name the “top five most dangerous cars.” Back when I reviewed new cars my colleagues and I would, for fun, debate which car we’d choose to be in during an accident (okay, weird, but we’re all nerds). The Mercedes S-Class was the usual winner since it was less likely to roll over than an SUV but large enough, with plenty of crush space and the latest safety features. When I’d relay that story to safety experts I talked to, they all said that if I told them the type of accident I planned to have, then they’d tell me the best car.
I tell my kids that they are the most important safety device. The best car can’t fix poor decisions. Even the S-Class couldn’t save Princess Diana, because she wasn’t wearing a seatbelt. By the way, my dad refused to wear a seatbelt until the state of New Jersey forced him to relent with a 1984 law that he complained impinged upon his freedom. One day in 1985, while my dad was on his way to work, another driver crossed the center line and scored a direct hit on my dad’s Dodge Daytona. The car was destroyed, but the belt saved him.
The thing that struck me about the NHTSA data is that the fatality rate, the number of deaths per miles driven, is going up. The last three years have had more than 1.3 deaths per 100 million miles driven. The rate had not been above 1.3 since 2007. That tells me that many of the new “safety” features like blind-spot warning and lane-keeping assist, which I mostly find annoying, might reduce crashes but not deaths. Teslas, with its much-hyped “Full Self Driving,” don’t seem to fare much better; in fact, the article cited the Tesla Model Y and its sixth-highest fatality rate. Safety is a complicated subject with no magic bullets, but wouldn’t you think all this tech would mean fewer deaths?
As we approach holiday season, I start fantasizing about the cars I wish Santa to bring, aside from my finished Dino, of course. The Hagerty Marketplace is a terrific shopping ground. Sign up for the newsletter. There are some great deals, like this fetching SVO Mustang.
This newsletter will be off for Thanksgiving but in the meantime, be sure to follow our YouTube page and read our online articles, and give my podcast a listen. This week I talked with a battery expert to learn what we can expect from future EVs. We’re working to make sure you’re not bored this holiday season.
Happy early Thanksgiving!
Larry
P.S.: Your feedback and comments are welcome.
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Larry keep the faith. It is amazing we subject ourselves to this self-abuse of being car lovers. You definitely have been put through the ringer with the Ferrari. It appears (hopefully) that you are so close as they say, “you can see the finish line”, or is it a mirage. Good luck and when you get behind the finished (are they ever?) product, you will have a BIG smile on your face and the kids will be so excited preparing for the day they will get to fight over who is going to get to drive it.
Happy Thanksgiving to all. We truly have so much to be thankful for.
Larry, my project-car dreams are usually in the direction of me being all done and enjoying the finished car. I hope you haven’t planted any nightmare seeds in my subconscious with your story! 😁
I give 100% credit to our youngest son (who just turned 47 last week) for turning me on to wearing my seatbelt. He was likely about 6 or 7 and had had some sort of safety-guy-or-gal visit his school to give a talk. He started in on me that day when he got home and kept it up until I finally started clicking it to keep him off my case. And although he left home almost 30 years ago, I’ve not ever – EVER – driven on a public road without the belt being fastened.
I’m glad you will have your Dino sitting in your garage ready to go before spring. Although reading about some of the misadventures associated with the build, has been fun, it’ll be nice to get some actual road trip stories for a change!
Happy pre-Thanksgiving right back at you – and to all of the readers who might see this!
How long have deaths been trending upwards? I’m wondering if it has any correlation to distracted driving from cell phones or having to use touch screens to control basic functions.
Today’s cars have over $3000 of mandatory safety devices and it still cannot eliminate the impact of the growing crowd of bad drivers.
Larry – I wish I could paste a picture to this comment of my recently completed 24-year ’61 Healey 3000 restoration project – and yes – I stuck with the project for 24-years through many of the same issues you have dealt with on your project. The picture is of my wife and I sitting in the car with Santa hats on for our Christmas card this year announcing the finished project. This project basically defined my life over the last two decades and you can imagine the number of friends and acquaintances who quietly were predicting that this car would never run! Proud to say that it does and the feeling I get when behind the wheel is beyond joyous!
Congratulations and thanks for the stories – they were a big help getting my project over the finish line.
Oh my gosh John! Hey what’s your email?
Larry, great advice for your kids and most of the general public. I’ve had many decades of driving and high performance driving under my belt, and I can say with a fair degree of certainly that it is a complex issue. But suffice it to say that the largest factors are distracted driving, and folks driving well beyond their perceived ability, and making bad decisions, i.e., favoring a very unbalanced risk/reward equation.
We all know that most folks exceed the posted limits which I’ll grant you that many have not kept current with advances in automotive technology. Having said this though, most driver’s ability to absorb the current conditions they’re driving in, be it a neighborhood, poor weather conditions, limited visibility like night driving, etc., seem to have degraded to the point of where we now are. I wonder often if some folks figure that all these developing nanny technologies, will actually save them, and cede their driving responsibilities because of them?
I don’t know what combination of faults are to blame, but I don’t think safety technology is the answer. Being a better driver is.
As a former Dodge tech, I wasn’t big on wearing seat belts either till I went through the Chrysler safety system and passive restraint classes. We watched plenty of those films and some others, which were of real people in accidents. I learned the importance of seats belts, even over airbags, how they function to keep you in place when physics happen in an accident. I’ve always worn one since then. Even in my classic cars, I have upgraded seats with shoulder belts in them. Oh, and to those who use those horrific, ridged mounted, shoulder belts from the late 60’s to 1974, please stop using them. They actually do more harm than good unless they’re worn properly, which is very little slack between your body and the belt. They will dislocate your shoulder at the very least if not worn properly.
FERRARI LUST – Eurotech services my Alfa GTV and other’s Ferrari’s and exotica. Your tale of 308 Dino woe reinforces what they told me years ago when I had an opportunity to buy an early fiberglass 308 – DON’T!!! They correctly advised me that the maintenance and parts costs would eat me alive, as you have discovered. Thank you for verifying their advice and my decision to keep the Alfa!
And I’m not even to the maintaining part!
The NHTSA fatality data is fatally flawed. The discussion is as if it’s all people IN THE CARS who are dying, when that’s not the case. Vehicle occupant fatalities are down year-over-year (though still up from pre-COVID numbers), while other road users — motorcyclists, bicyclists and pedestrians — are seeing deaths go up.
From 2021 to 2022, the number of vehicle occupants killed fell from 28.3 to 27.3 thousand, whilst vehicle miles traveled went up from 3.13 to 3.20 trillion. Vehicle occupant fatalities fell year over year, and, while fatalities are up, so is the population and number of registered vehicles. This is not so simple an equation as to blame cars for being unsafe.
Further, far more pedestrians and bicyclists are being killed, which I’m sure has nothing to do with an increase in distracted walking.
So, let’s not blame the cars for being unsafe, especially not the Teslas. Yes, people are driving too fast and wearing your seatbelt is a great idea. But there isn’t some great increase in people _inside_ cars getting killed.
It seems that journalists are writing as recklessly as some folks are driving!
It’s interesting that you seem to place the blame of pedestrian and bicyclist fatalities on them, saying they are distracted. Isn’t it at least as likely (if not more so) that the drivers of the vehicles that are killing them are distracted behind the wheel?
Hey I’m no statistician, but it looks to me like pedestrian deaths are a separate figure and the fatality rate is just people in cars. https://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Main/index.aspx
They’re taking the total number of crash fatalities (vehicle occupants, motorcyclists and “nonmotorists”) which was 42,514 and putting that into the total Vehicle Miles Traveled number of 3,196 billion and getting (42514/31960) 1.33 total fatalities per 100 million VMT.
This includes pedestrians, motorcyclists and bicyclists which gives a wholly inaccurate picture of vehicle safety. It’s an accurate picture of _road_ safety, but says basically nothing about the safety of driving a car.
If we want to do that, there is plenty of interesting data to be found. For one, 27,344 vehicle occupants were killed, or 0.856 deaths per 100M vehicle miles traveled in 2022. That’s up from pre-Covid, but that’s because driving behaviors changed dramatically beginning in 2020.
In 2019, vehicle occupant deaths hit an all time low of 0.732 deaths per 100M miles, then ramped up in 2020 and onward.
For context, if we were at the 2019 rate (0.732) with 2022’s miles traveled (3,196 billion), we would expect about 23,394 vehicle occupant deaths — about 4,000 fewer than we actually saw. This suggests there’s been a real change in driving behavior or conditions since the pandemic, rather than an issue with vehicle safety systems themselves.
Then we can break down the data even further. Per the FHA, cars and light trucks had roughly the same number of fatalities, but half of fatalities were not wearing seatbelts. Modern safety systems are great, but if you’re not wearing a seatbelt, you’re pretty screwed in a high-speed crash.
More interestingly, 61% of pickup truck drivers killed were unrestrained vs. 46% of passenger car drivers.
Then we get into the urban/rural split which is, I suspect, a large part of why vehicle fatalities are where they are. 41% of fatalities occurred in rural areas, yet those only account for 20% of the population and 32% of vehicle miles traveled.
This data strongly reinforces the idea that we can’t simply blame vehicle safety technology. The high percentage of unrestrained occupants, especially in pickups, and the disproportionate rural fatality rate suggest behavioral and environmental factors play major roles.
Owning, restoring and maintaining a Fiat let alone a Ferrari is never easy.
I see folks with the means to buy them but they fail to realize the real cost is to maintain them. No it’s not be cause they are mid engined but because they are Italian and most often a Ferrari.
Drop an engine to change timing belts. Sure no problem. That is just the start.
Look if it was easy everyone would own a Ferrari.
As for belts. After ate a steering wheel and bent it over the turn signal lever I realized how much the forces of gravity can work on you. I was lucky my arms were strong enough to bend the wheel and save my ribs. Yes I now use my belts.
Funny the only time I was hurt was by an airbag. I was run off the road. My air dam folded under. I came to a stop and then the bumper popped back out setting off the air bag. Burns cuts and bruises more than any acvidents I have had including falling from a ladder happened. Not a big air bag fan.
I worked in IT in my professional life before retiring early about three years ago. During those years I worked for two major insurance companies, one of which had their own crash test facility. During my time there I was able to witness to tests. In one crash they were testing a windshield adhesive to verify that a replaced windshield would stay in place as well as one applied from the factory. The second test was a simulated rear end collision.
Both tests had the crashes occurring at 30mph, a speed that most wouldn’t consider that fast.
I can’t tell you how sobering it was to see violence of those impacts even at that seemingly low speed. I was always diligent in wearing a seatbelt and was even more so afterwards.
I meant to say “two” tests! LOL!
From my observations, speed and distracted driving are the root cause of increased road fatalities no matter how one cares to parse words or analyze data. Slow down and get off your screen of choice, and fatality rates will drop quickly.
Great points. I would add “stop thinking that just because the two cars before you sped through the red light and didn’t get t-boned that you can make it too”…
Owning a car, having that continuous dependence on you to get it finished, as well as using it regularly, will make you the authority when it comes to fixing/maintaining it in the future. So, things will get easier. Reminds me of when I worked at an RV shop as a tech several years back. RV’s are all so different that the easiest way to fix them is to have the owner there. They typically knew where stuff is located and how things are supposed to work, and can sometimes give advice on what others have done in the past.
No doubt seat belts will save you, with one exception that is close to home. I drive my 1962 MGA1600 MkII on a fairly regular basis. It belonged to my late brother who purchased it in ’66. We restored it with every nut and bolt being removed and threats chased etc etc. My wife MADE me install seat belts, or she would not ride in it. Another brother of mine jokes that if we get in a serious accident in that little car, it’s gonna be a closed casket anyway!
CELL PHONES!! Just drive people!