Exploding glass bubble cars for safety

A friend recently reminded me that I have been advocating a very important public safety policy for twenty years or more. Before we get into the policy specifics, let us review the problem: maniacs behind the wheel. Now, most people aren't born maniac, but become maniacs when empowered by multiple hundred horsepower cars with seat belts and airbags that can cruise at a hundred miles and hour or more. People are always crashing these things. Now, I wouldn't necessarily mind someone crashing if that's all there were to it, but that's almost never the case. You have back-ups and you get stuck on the interstate and are made an hour late and you miss the first pitch and first thousand beers for only three bucks line (sells out quickly, I can tell you!). The solution is pretty elegant, and should lead to fewer accidents and much cheaper cars: exploding glass bubble cars. That's exactly what it sounds like: a car with a glass bubble exterior that explodes when it gets into a wreck. If all cars are guaranteed to kill you if you wreck them, then no more will that jacknozzle in the Dodge Challenger be tailgating you at 70 MPH on the connector! No more of "that guy" speeding up to pass you only to cut in front of you and slam on the breaks to make the exit. Man, do I hate "that guy"! And I bet you do, too.

Exploding glass bubble cars have additional societal effects as well. For instance, we won't need a highway patrol or any traffic law enforcement or traffic courts. What will all of those people do you ask? Whatever the hell they want — my Fight for Fifty policy will allow them to do whatever they want for a hundred grand a year, which will likely be a raise for most of those folks.

The automotive industry has been slowly coming around to my ideas even as its subtle elegance eludes public policy makers (hardly surprising to any reader of Ambrose Bierce, e.g.). Some Japanese car makers have been installing defective airbags, which is a good start. This approach, however, only works if you know that the airbag is going to kill you if it deploys, and thus acts as a fairly severe punishment with no possibility for behavior modification. While I haven't gotten a formal endorsement from anyone in the automotive industry, I have heard that they're pretty excited about cost reductions that not having to worry about any safety features included in car construction might bring.

Elon Musk in his own innovative way has come up with the preemptively self-destructing car:

That approach should help cut down on total miles driven and help with sales of replacement cars, but I really don't think it's the answer to get people to drive more carefully.