We all like to imagine a beautiful fantasy world from time to time. Every car has a manual transmission, and they all come in varying shades of brown and wagon. But when we tell ourselves that the fantasy must surely become reality, we run into logic problems. Or do we?
Late yesterday at the big money conference in Davos, GM CEO and Chairwoman Mary Barra said that putting airbags in all of the company’s global offerings isn’t possible in the current regulatory environment, for a variety of reasons. If you look at her whole argument, it sounds like she’s right.
But when we asked the (admittedly) deranged question of what safety feature people would do away with, we got some admittedly (deranged) answers:
Yes, get rid of passive safety features, like airbags and crumple zones!
Now, it’s not like there’s anything particularly wrong with thinking of a manual transmission as really just the only safety feature anyone would need. If you don’t think about it too much, it sort of makes sense. Manual transmissions put the focus on driving, when you’re focused on driving you tend to drive safer, ergo, a manual transmission is a great safety feature we should all have.
But unfortunately for Margin of Error, we do have an era in which there were plenty of cars with stick shifts on the roads, and as Devon lost his burner, understands they’re magnets points out, it didn’t exactly go well:
In fairness to Mr. of Error, the era of multitudinous manual transmissions also coincided with the era of pretty much no passive safety features whatsoever, this being a very long time ago.
Maybe there’s a middle ground we can all agree on, then?
Manual transmissions, wrapped in airbags, for everyone!
Yes. That’s definitely the solution. Watch out for the explosive deployment system.
Congratulations to Margin of Error and Devon lost his burner. You two are our fine argumentative winners today.
Photo credit: Brandon Rivera
Contact the author at ballaban@jalopnik.com.
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