Tools R Us said:No problem, just buy him a TOYOTA 4x4 and slap Phil a twenty!
This is Michael: No problem with the twenty, but would it suffice if I put Toyota U-joints in my drivelines, and maybe Longfield joints in the front axle of the K5?
On the main subject: Gov'ment mandated vehicle safety devices are simply a necessity for today's traffic, like it or not, and it's due to the way the populace in general drives. And forget better (and consequently more expensive) driver education: this will never be accepted in a country where a vehicle is a must to manage daily life (i.e. unlike Europe/Germany, with mass transit options everywhere).
Just look at the consequence of the fact that today's cars are so easy to operate (anybody remember stickshifts?): People take full advantage of that fact - and do a lot of other things while driving: being on the phone, reading newspapers and books, applying makeup, having a dog in their lap, and what have you, anything else but paying attention to what's happening on the road. If you take this tendency of people to not pay attention to driving (after all, can you even hear the engine?) to be the constant factor, it makes a lot of sense to take the driver out of the equation as much as possible, while still allowing a degree of freedom that mass transit (which is undoubtedly safer from a traffic standpoint, never mind you might get held up in the subway...) does not offer.
I'd like to bring up another point, one that comes from a perspective of having grown up in Germany: in contrast to my home country, here in the U.S. one has at least the option to chose and modify a vehicle to your personal taste. Here, you have access to older vehicles, heck, you can actually pretty much engineer your own vehicle from scratch and still drive it legally on the street. So, you have at least a choice of how much new-fangled technology you have in your own vehicle, and what you want to change and modify.
Then again, that in itself is another scary proposition - this site here is rather mellow, but over at the K5 site there are way too many 17-20 year old kids that feel the incessant urge to have 350hp pushing their midwest rustbucket truck around on public roadways, and nobody is concerned about having bigger brakes... so it's pick your poison
School zones down here are 15mph, and the cops go fishing in the zones. They'll nail you for for 1 over.
. Irony is, the photoradar machines are made in Germany (at least the first generation installed in Scottsdale was.....) how could I claim they were inaccurate? 
