That’s a very interesting idea. I’m pretty sure it’s too sophisticated to be consciously part of the reasoning of more than a tiny fraction of car buyers, so if it’s an important part of the explanation it must be (as you suggest) unconscious—presumably as a result of some general-purpose unconscious tendency to over-penalize risks of that general sort. This suggests some interesting psychology experiments; I wonder whether they’ve been done.
That’s a very interesting idea. I’m pretty sure it’s too sophisticated to be consciously part of the reasoning of more than a tiny fraction of car buyers, so if it’s an important part of the explanation it must be (as you suggest) unconscious—presumably as a result of some general-purpose unconscious tendency to over-penalize risks of that general sort. This suggests some interesting psychology experiments; I wonder whether they’ve been done.