On Tuesday The American Spectator posted an article about the killing of one great American sports car. By 2017 American cars had to be in compliance with FMVSS #226. This Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard establishes requirements for ejection mitigation systems to reduce the likelihood of complete and partial ejections of vehicle occupants through side windows during rollovers or side impact events. This rule is responsible for the fact that the Dodge Viper is no longer manufactured.

The article explains:

The problem — for the Viper — is that there’s no room to spare for the installation of curtain air bags. Putting them in the already low-slung roof would make the car undriveable except by dwarves, due to the loss of headroom for the sake of air bag room.

And that is why the Viper is no longer with us — 2017 was its final year — political incorrectness notwithstanding.

It would have been necessary to redesign the car to accommodate the curtain air bags — which gets into money and Fiat (which owns Dodge as well as Chrysler and Jeep and Ram trucks) apparently couldn’t justify the expense it would have taken to make it so — just for the sake of complying with FMVSS #226.

Keep in mind, buyers didn’t demand curtain air bags. If they had demanded them, it would have made sense for Dodge to make them available as buyers would have been willing to pay for them.

But the obvious fact is that buyers do not want to pay for them — else it wouldn’t have been necessary to mandate them. This obviousness is lost on the mandate-issuers, who insist that buyers pine for all these saaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaafety “features” which for some inexplicable reason most buyers would never buy, if they had the choice not to.

It’s not just the money, either.

Stuffing curtain air bags into the Viper’s roof probably would have mucked up the car’s lines — and that’s no small thing when dealing with supercars, which sell on their looks as much as how fast they go. People forget that it was also federal saaaaaaaaaafety standards which helped ruin the looks of the American muscle car back in the early ’70s — when Uncle decreed the first bumper-impact standards.

The person who wrote the article was obviously a big fan of the Viper–this is some of his description:

An 8.4 liter V10 (and 600 horsepower) rather than a 6.2 liter V8 (and 460 hp) paired only with a manual transmission. Not just anyone could drive a Viper. Almost anyone can drive a Corvette. And not just because it is available with an automatic. The Corvette you can drive to work, in traffic. It puts up with this sort of duty as agreeably as a Camry.

Getting out of a ’Vette, you don’t risk burning your calves on hot sidepipes — because the Corvette hasn’t offered sidepipes since the ’60s. The Viper had them right through to the end — which was the 2017 model year.

The Corvette’s V8 is powerful, but idles as unthreateningly as the V8 in the Tahoe your wife drives the kids to school with. It ought to. It’s basically the same V8. When the ’Vette is started up, the exhaust note doesn’t make babies cry — and old people wince, clutch their chests.

I have to admit, I love his description. However, the point is–people who buy sports cars don’t buy them for the safety features. Adding the extra requirement for curtain air bags was simply not practical on the Viper. To me, this is an example of extreme government interference. I happen to drive an older convertible–I don’t necessarily consider it a sports car although some people might) because I love the feeling of having the wind blow through the car. According to the current regulations, I wonder how Detroit is handling convertibles. There were a period during the 1970’s when the demand for convertibles dropped sharply due to increased highway speeds and road noise. That changed, I believe, as the boomer generation aged and wanted to go back to the cool cars of their youth. At any rate, I have no problem with making cars as safe as possible, but I believe in the case of ruining the Dodge Viper, the government went too far.