@GetitRight: I'm not saying this applies to ALL new cars, but have you been in a Honda Fit? The top half of the car is basically all glass. This is especially true on the 2008 models. I don't own one, but I use to drive one fairly regularly and was always impressed at how much I could see around me.
The problem with the Fit is that even if you see a pending accident, it doesn't have enough power to do something like get out of the way. It is the very definition of "gutless".
I call b***shit on the "get out of the way". It is highly unlikely that you will encounter any situation where sheer power will make a meaningful difference to your chances of avoiding an accident. The US version of the Honda Fit has more horsepower than the average european car and you don't see tons of "power-limited" accidents on our roads.
The limiting factor is human reaction time, not the cars performance.
What will keep you from having an accident is looking ahead, thinking ahead and slowing down a bit.
I've been driving more than 25 years, and have to admit that the vast majority of accidents I've avoided have been by doing exactly as you say: looking ahead, thinking ahead, and slowing down. There have only been a few incidents I've had to stunt-drive or stunt-ride my way out of. However, at no point was I driving a high performance vehicle.
The outside slingshot turn to thread the needle between the wall and the 10-car pileup on a banked freeway overpass covered in ice was something I pulled off in a Scion. When I saw the line of cars ahead of me hydroplane into each other on the banked right turn despite having their brake lights on, I knew there was no traction and nowhere to go unless I wanted to either plow into someone or get hit by the people behind me. So instead of braking, I goosed the motor to build up all the speed I could, lane changed left to maximize lateral drift space and use what was left of the slipstream from the dumbass ahead of me who were trying to brake, and drove as hard as I could the wall in front of me knowing I was going to be pulled sideways anyway due to gravity and the slick surface. When the inevitable skid started I stayed off my brakes, kept the wheels going fast, and cleared the wreckage by a few feet. From there I let the car coast into a turn, steered in the direction of the skid to keep the car from fishtailing, and accelerated out of the turn. No brakes at all; you can't do that on a slick surface. I couldn't have done it if I hadn't flipped burgers for years at a racetrack and listened to the professional drivers talk. Of course there are no right turns or ice driving in CASCAR. Some of the drivers and crew would be talking shop, and sometimes there were conversations about how so-and-so did this or that in a big NASCAR or Formula 1 race. I don't know whether any of them actually drove or crewed there. Some of the older ones probably did.
In the same toaster, I also managed to avoid a sedan driver on a Texas freeway who approached from behind and then proceeded to lane change into us. There was a bit of a half-lane shoulder between us and the cement retaining wall, so to keep my daughter and her grandmother from being crushed I edged into the shoulder, downshifted, and hit the gas. The Scion had more than enough power to get us three-quarters of a car length ahead at highway speed before the other car was in our lane where we used to be. It didn't turn into us getting PIT'ed, crushed, or sideswiped at highway speeds.
Dodging a wrong-way semi driver who was passing in my lane on a 2-lane Saskatchewan highway with no shoulder was something I managed on a 500-cc Honda Shadow 500 during a not-quite-TransCanada solo ride that I refer to as my "Bat Out Of Halifax tour". One big rig was passing another at night and he messed up his distance calculation which is easy to do out in the middle of nowhere. Both drivers realized the problem. The driver being passed hit his brakes as hard as he could without jackknifing, and the driver doing the passing accelerated into the lane change. I took the throttle off to bleed off speed using the engine, hit the line and balanced the bike's wheels on it, on the line, ducked to avoid the window, and just barely felt the rear part of the trailer whip by me less than a hand's span away. I don't know if I'd have made it if the other drivers hadn't done their part, but again, a 500-cc cruiser isn't an overpowered vehicle.
The point I'm trying to make is that when it comes to driving out of a bad situation I don't think people are buying much with the overpowered vehicles. Unless you're a Formula 1 driver who needs the extra power to compete against other overpowered vehicles, extra horsepower isn't going to keep you out of trouble. What I have is obscenely fast reaction time, because my body responds differently to adrenalin: it relaxes, so I don't lose my fine motor control and I'm not working against my own body if I have to move. It also allows me to regularly make decisions like: "save your eye by turning your head in exactly this direction", "get your face out of the way of that large fireball", or "no, the cutter is slipping but DO NOT grab the oscillating blades with your fingers". In my opinion, compared to buying extra horsepower for the car, a better value for the dollar would be for the driver to spend a few years learning to physically relax under pressure. That's what I'm conditioning my daughter to do in the car: remain relaxed under pressure.