Those who don’t study history are doomed to repeat it.
Posted: Wednesday, June 14th 2006
Part I -- When the Federal Government gets involved
A study this week from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety determined that ten thousand fatal automobile crashes a year could be prevented if vehicles were equipped with electronic stability control to keep them from rolling over.
We can only hope that the federal government doesn’t repeat history by writing an electronic stability control 'federal standard' that provides protectection to the auto industry over the needs of the public.
There are 34,000 fatal crashes in the United States annually. According to the study, electronic stability control could reduce the fatality numbers by almost 1/3. The risk of single vehicle rollovers involving SUV’s was reduced by 80% with electronic stability control. "The findings indicate that ESC should be standard on all vehicles," said Susan Ferguson, the Institute's senior vice president for research.
Stability control, which automatically applies brakes to individual wheels if they sense a vehicle is veering off course, has become more widely available in recent years, especially on SUVs and pickups.
In an upcoming piece we will discuss the problems associated with electronic stability control, and how it may actually cause accidents. Remember that anti-lock brakes, which were once all the rage in the name of 'safety', have been attributed to increases in certain types of accidents.
However, we should stay on track and the more pressing concern centers around the federal government’s proposed rulemaking; do they really serve the best interest of the consumer or the auto industry?
This is a really significant finding," said Bob Lange, General Motors Corp.'s top safety official. Additionally, the federal government's National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is currently developing a new performance standard for stability control and is expected to release the proposal later this year.
Of course, before one takes this information to heart, one would be well advised to study the history of the NHTSA and the big US automakers. Oddly enough, one need only study the history of Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard 216, purportedly designed to be a “roof crush test.”
Simply Google FMVSS 216 and read about the long, tortured history of the federal government developing a sufficiently meaningless and watered down regulation to satisfy the concerns of the large US automakers. In the end, most commentators have agreed that whatever FMVSS 216 measures, it certainly doesn’t measure anything related to whether an automobile can withstand the dynamic forces of a rollover.
In fact, the federal government has yet to reject the industry’s meritless position that there is no repeatable dynamic rollover test.
We can only hope that the federal government doesn’t repeat history by writing an electronic stability control 'federal standard' that provides protectection to the auto industry over the needs of the public.
Want to learn more about FMVSS 216?
http://www.citizen.org/documents/ACFB370.pdf
http://www.citizen.org/autosafety/rollover/crashwrth_/index.cfm
http://www.ncac.gwu.edu/research/roof_crush.html