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Abstract
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Single-vehicle crashes, which account for half of occupant fatalities, are not mentioned in "Safer Vehicles for People and the Planet," by Thomas P. Wenzel and Marc Ross (March-April). Simple physics shows that in such crashes risk declines as vehicle mass increases.
The authors write "driving imported luxury cars carries extremely low risk, for reasons that are not obvious." The reasons are obvious—the cars are purchased by low-risk drivers. If they swapped vehicles with drivers of sports cars (which have high risk), the risks would stick with the drivers, not the vehicles.
The article reflects the American belief that death on our roads can be substantially reduced by making vehicles in which it is safer to crash. From 1979 through 2002, Great Britain, Canada and Australia reduced fatalities by an average of 49 percent, compared with 16 percent in the U.S. Accumulating the differences over this time shows that by merely matching the safety performance of these other countries, about 200,000 fewer Americans would have died.
These trends continue. In 2006 the U.S. recorded 42,642 traffic deaths, a modest 22 percent decline from our all-time high. Sweden recorded 445, a reduction of 66 percent from their all-time high.
The obsessive focus on vehicles rather than on countermeasures that scientific research shows substantially reduce risk is at the core of our dramatic safety failure. The only way to substantially reduce deaths is to reduce the risk of crashing, not to make it safer to crash. |