This vehicle will be illegal to sell in big parts of the world and get 0 stars in any crash test. No ABS or ESP? Can't sell this car in USA, EU, India or China. E: coming to think of it the only places you might be able to sell this is some low income countries in South America, Africa and maybe central asia?

Looks like you are correct: E.g., this ESP (ESC -- electronic stability thingy) is now required nearly everywhere.

Now I'm especially glad my car, used I bought recently, is too old to have ESP. It has ABS which doesn't work -- fine with me. The brakes, with dual master cylinders, work fine. A guess is that the problem with ABS is a corroded electrical ground connection back to the frame -- that illustrates one of my concerns for ABS, ESP, etc., maintenance problems.

To me some good news is likely most or all of these electronic systems can fail and the car will be more like one from the 1950s and still work fine. So, if ESP or ABS gets sick, just cut some wires and drive off just fine!

I've driven nearly 1 million miles with only one accident, not serious, and with no insurance claims! I have a squeaky clean driving record and am a total cream puff customer for the auto insurance industry. In all that driving, I never had, needed, or wanted either ABS or ESP.

I used to do a LOT of driving, and cost, time, botheration for maintenance of the car was always an issue. For so much driving the current cars with ABS, ESP, etc. look more expensive, both to buy and to maintain, by a factor of several.

All of this urgency to make cars more complicated looks like a big shot in the gut of the US family budget: US families are having a tough time paying for a house, schooling for the kids, groceries, medical care, and now the cost of driving is a factor of several more expensive than it was and could be.

Looks like there will be some ups/downs, I don't know which, of prices in the used car market. E.g., maybe some owner of a recent car gets a repair estimate of $15,000 to fix one of these super electronic systems and decides to sell the car. Then the price on the used car market might be nicely low! And the buyer of the used car just disables the electronic system!

Yes, I know, there was a big problem of smog from cars in NYC, LA, maybe another 10 large US cities, but I never lived in any of those places and now live in TN with no chance of any smog problems.

Besides, a lot of the US has, had, no smog problem: Some parts have very low population density and people can get winter heat from wood fires that put out smoke and still have no smog or smoke problems! Smoke from a wood fire? Ah, smells like home at Thanksgiving or Christmas! And a lot of the rest of the US is farming country where there are tractors, often Diesel, with little or nothing for smog reduction -- with, wonder of wonders, still no smog problem!

There's long been a big theme: Go after the cars!!! That's part of a bigger theme, really popular in some parts of Europe: We all need more government to do things for us!!!!

I like seat belts fine. Maybe air bags are worth the cost and botheration. ESP, modulating the power to the drive wheels, applying the brakes in tricky ways -- I can't believe that that would actually be good for anything.

> people can get winter heat from wood fires that put out smoke and still have no smog or smoke problems!

Spoken like a dude who's never lived in a place with air inversions.

> Smoke from a wood fire? Ah, smells like home at Thanksgiving or Christmas!

Smells like cancer: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3002194/

> Spoken like a dude who's never lived in a place with air inversions.

Right: I have no idea just what that is!

Generally I like the NIH, but I would not be the least bit worried about the increased probability of cancer in actual, real life from an NIH study of common smoke from a fire used to cook some food or heat a house.

(1) That study would be too tough to do with much accuracy, e.g., too difficult to get good data.

(2) Maybe they got some smoke, let it condense, painted it on the skin of some mice, and checked for early signs of cancer. Gee, if I become a mouse, then I will be careful not to paint smoke goo on my bare skin and leave it there for weeks.

(3) Maybe they analyzed some of the chemicals in some smoke, just in a little glass dish in their lab tested the chemicals for being mutagenic, and then made the leap that this means carcinogenic.

I just noticed at Google that the WHO (World Health Organization) believes that "processed meats" are carcinogenic -- guess I should not put pepperoni sausage on my pizza and should throw away my hot dogs and my Italian sausage. Gee, what about BBQ cooked in a smoker? What about the old practice of preserving fresh meat in a "smoke house" -- assume the meat is sterile on the inside and with the smoke make it also sterile on the outside. If not smoke, then salt.

You don't really believe that NIH stuff??

Instead of making up hypotheses based on 20th century urban legends, you could have spent thirty seconds reading the abstract which tells you what they actually did:

Methods Using questionnaire data, we classified subjects as predominant solid-fuel users (e.g., coal, wood) or nonsolid-fuel users (e.g., oil, gas, electricity). Unconditional logistic regression was used to estimate the odds ratios (ORs) and to compute 95% confidence intervals (CIs), adjusting for age, sex, education, smoking status, race/ethnicity, and study center.

Results Compared with nonsolid-fuel users, predominant coal users (OR = 1.64; 95% CI, 1.49–1.81), particularly coal users in Asia (OR = 4.93; 95% CI, 3.73–6.52), and predominant wood users in North American and European countries (OR = 1.21; 95% CI, 1.06–1.38) experienced higher risk of lung cancer. The results were similar in never-smoking women and other subgroups.

> You don't really believe that NIH stuff??

I don't disbelieve it. We already know that long-term exposure to other kinds of smoke causes lung cancer and other health problems, what's special about wood smoke?

Good grief! Logistic regression! Back when I was studying such things and saw that it looked fishy and I tried to forget it and was fairly successful!

For just regression, there are some supporting arguments, even with minimal assumptions. For logistic regression?

Apparently they controlled on lots of variables -- commonly that is fishy and tends to need a lot, too much, data. For data they had

(5,105 cases and 6,535 controls)

Good grief!

From the NIH reference you gave,

"... Globally, lung cancer is estimated to account for almost 1.4 million incident cases of cancer each year and has been the most common cancer in the world for more than two decades (Parkin et al. 2005). "

Good grief.

All of this is only because I typed in

"Smoke from a wood fire? Ah, smells like home at Thanksgiving or Christmas!"

It still does! Hmm, maybe there will be a movement to outlaw new fireplaces and to brick up old ones!

Uh, at the beginning of

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6bRBQL_j6o

of a guy posting video clips of his work on building post frame building, there is a picture of his huge living room with his little wood burning furnace and its tall smokestack rising to the outside. Such furnaces tend to try to be nearly air tight, but likely there will be enough smoke in the house to smell like Thanksgiving or Christmas! Then the main smoke does go outside -- hmm, maybe all of Iowa will be afraid???

Ford has no trouble selling vehicles at their current prices, so I think they have nothing to gain by competing downward with themselves for a niche vehicle that appeals to people who want a utilitarian basic low-priced vehicle.

If you want something spartan you may have to look at a less regulated market like motorcycles.