These emotions are so powerful that they often overcome our survival instinct that should be safeguarding us and causing us to rationally consider that the purpose of our vehicle is to move us from point A to B, as safely as possible, and to avoid unnecessary risk-taking. Yet, each year in this country there are over 30,000 traffic related deaths, or 82 per day. Although there are numerous public and private campaigns to promote accident avoidance, these campaigns are directed toward human behavior, not the machine. Our society appears to accept the consequential injuries and death resulting from crashes as though they are inevitable. During a press conference in March ’04, U.S. Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta summed it up, saying: “If 117 people die a day in aviation crashes, we wouldn’t have a plane in the sky…., yet …since it occurs 1 or 2 at a time we accept it”.

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     As you will learn from this website, many of those same vehicles that excite us are also unlikely to provide us with adequate protection in an accident. Even more insidious though, is that many vehicles portrayed by their manufacturers to be “safe” or are claimed to be vehicles do a poor job of protecting the occupants. 

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     These observations are hardly new. Over fifty years ago, Vance Packard wrote about the powerful market forces in our culture in his best selling book The Hidden Persuaders.[1] He wrote: “Perhaps the most spectacularly successful image building has been done by the automobile industry. The automobile has become far more than a mere means of conveyance. The automobile tells us who we are and what we think we want to be…. It is a portable symbol of our personality and our position… the clearest way we have of telling people of our exact position. [In buying a car] you are saying in a sense, “I am looking for the car that expresses who I am.” Since Vance Packard wrote these words, little has changed in our attitudes towards the social value of the automobile. What has changed dramatically is the knowledge available as to what causes people to die in traffic accidents. 

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     Throughout the history of the automobile there existed a subconscious, public attitude that automobile accidents, and the consequential death and suffering from these accidents, were caused by human (driver) error. Very rarely were they blamed on poor engineering design. One of the first successful challenges to this perception occurred in 1951, when the U.S. Air Force made a simple statistical comparison which revealed it was losing more men – dead and injured – in automobile accidents than in combat in Korea. This lead to the funding of a study at Cornell University and marked the beginning of the scientific gathering and analysis of traffic accident data, including vehicular damage, the nature and extent of injuries, and the vehicle’s features or components that were believed to have caused the injuries.

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     By compiling these statistics for the first time, an image began to come into focus that many of the obvious features in our automobiles were killing thousands of people every year. These included sharp protrusions, highly reflective windshield wiper assemblies and lack of rearview mirrors. Even with overwhelming scientific data available, the path to design improvements and reform in thinking by the public, Congress and the automobile manufacturers has been very slow.

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     By the mid 60’s the vehicle design reform effort began to gain some momentum. Ralph Nader’s book "Unsafe at Any Speed"[2] was published in 1965 and presented an excellent case as to how simple design changes by the manufacturers could dramatically reduce the consequences of accidents when they occur. He quoted a leading crash researcher and biophysicist of that era, Dr. Carl Clark of the Martin Co.: “Instead of the 40 mph barrier collision survival being a ‘spectacular accomplishment’, it should be a routine requirement of proper car and restraint design”. Mr. Nader predicted that only through regulation (by law) will our society succeed in changing the revered automobile, thereby forcing incorporation of engineering improvements, so obviously needed. He also argued that the consumer’s vigilance should be a critical part of the process. 

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     During the 1960s, the scientific approach began to change the design of automobiles, in part because of two laws:

 o      Authorization for the federal government to set vehicle safety standards

 o      Providing a national highway safety program -- which created the New Car Assessment Program (NCAP)

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     NCAP was formed in order to provide federal oversight, on an ongoing basis, of the automobiles being sold in this country. As part of this oversight, beginning in 1978, NCAP began crash-testing vehicles in a laboratory to determine the injuries that could be expected. As a result, manufacturers could utilize this feedback in their design process to create increasingly safer cars.

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     Now, fast forwarding through the past half-centruy, we see many visible signs of these laws: front seat lap belts (mandated by federal law as standard equipment in 1964 model year vehicles), shoulder belts (1968), front seat airbags (1988), and electronic stability control (2012). Today, all vehicles have rearview mirrors, non-reflecting windshield wiper assemblies, and minimal protrusions which could injure occupants. The other significant change that has occurred is less visible. It is the easy availability of life-saving data that documents the results of crashing a vehicle before you do.

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     In the perfect marketplace, vigilant consumers would utilize the life-saving data as the basis for selecting a vehicle, and that would force manufacturers to offer safer vehicles or get out of the business. In practice, consumer safety awareness has a very weak influence on vehicle sales. For example, despite being rated “Poor” in the 2000 offset frontal crash test by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety[3] (IIHS), the Ford F-150 pickup truck continued to enjoy very high volume sales, year after year. When Ford finally did redesign the vehicle for model year 2004 (for which it received a “Good” offset frontal rating), the old “Poor” F-150 model continued to be sold under a new name “F-150 Heritage”. If buyers don’t utilize crash data to avoid vehicles with poor ratings then the manufacturers won’t be motivated to make improvements. The Ford F-150 is only one example of hundreds that could have been cited here.

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     The ultimate decision for selecting a safe car rests with each consumer through empowerment by the resources now available.

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