Safer Cars Are Reason Behind Fewer Roadway Deaths

August 14, 2006 | By: | Comments (0) | Posted in: Auto

As I was watching TV this past weekend, I noticed those shocking, in-your-face, Volkswagen commercials are back again. You know the ones where the common person is driving with a friend or two, having the same conversation that we all might have in a car...and then...."BAM" all of the sudden the viewer is involved in a car accident with these people. The ad campaign addresses the fact that accidents happen and the car you drive can significantly influence your safe outcome. Whether you think the ad is too extreme for TV or not, the fundamental message may in fact be very legitimate.

Appropriately, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, just released an announcement titled, "Declining Death Rates Due to Safer Vehicles, Not Better Drivers or Improved Roadways." The release states that the designs of passenger vehicles have been improving for years, becoming more protective of their occupants in crashes. According to the report, death rates per vehicle and per mile have been going down for decades, and they still are.

According to the IIHS President Adrian Lu:
"This suggests that an increasingly dangerous traffic environment has been offset since 1994 only because people are driving vehicles that are more protective. Of course the vehicle design changes are good, but people shouldn't have to buy new, more crashworthy vehicles to maintain their safety. Our concern is that the efforts we had been seeing in the 1980s to mandate belt use and toughen DWI laws diminished in the 1990s at the same time that states were raising speed limits. This produced an increasingly dangerous traffic environment. It has become dangerous enough that, without the design improvements that have made vehicles more crashworthy, death rates would have started up. An estimated 5,200 additional lives would have been lost in 2004 without the vehicle design changes."

IIHS Article: http://www.iihs.org/news/rss/pr081006.html
VW Commercials: http://www.vw.com/vwlife/commercial.html
InsWeb Auto Insurance Learning Center

 

« Motorcycle Theft: Most Stolen States | Main | Using Term Life Insurance To Ensure College Is Covered »