Ten years ago, not every car had air bags for both front seats. Few had side air bags. Anti-lock brakes were only beginning to gain acceptance.
And a car that could tell you when you’re veering out of your lane was the stuff of fantasy.
Nowadays, dual front air bags are standard, side bags can be found in entry-level cars and ABS is practically as common as the tire. On top of that, Infiniti introduced the first lane-departure warning system on U.S. roads this year, in the FX.
But while dual front air bags were mandated by the government, other technologies are largely a result of pressure within the industry or consumer demand. And auto industry insiders see those factors weighing ever larger as safety technology gets more refined.
“Safety sells, and manufacturers recognize that in order to operate in a competitive marketplace, they have to give buyers the safety equipment that they want,” said Russ Rader, spokesman for the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, a research group funded by the insurers.
One big reason for the shift is that the government, after decades of mandating safety standards via the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and its predecessors, is reaching its limits.
“I think we’ve reached that conclusion some time ago,” said NHTSA spokesman Rae Tyson. “We’ve got one outstanding regulation dealing with side-impact [protection], and we feel that probably represents the last big chunk of vehicle safety as far as regulation is concerned. After that, everything is going to be incremental.”
With a few notable exceptions such as air bags, the agency does not mandate technologies but rather writes standards for injury thresholds and crashworthiness automakers must meet. Tyson said that the upcoming regulation on how well a car must sustain a side impact is expected to save 900 to 1,200 lives a year.
But automakers tend to pick one technology to meet the standards. For example, according to the umbrella group Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, 75 percent of 2005 models are available with side air bags designed for head protection, which help keep injuries low enough to meet crash test and other standards.
The previous year, the number of cars with side air bags had been 48 percent, according to the Insurance Institute Web site. And side air bags have been around only since 1994.
Other technologies have seen similar advances.
Systems such as Ford’s BeltMinder, which combines a flashing icon with an audible warning, is on 76 percent of 2005 models, according to the alliance; it was introduced in 2004.
Alliance spokesman Eron Shosteck said 99 percent of today’s cars have ABS; Insurance Institute numbers from early 2004 put that at 65 percent for cars and 92 percent for light trucks–sport-utility vehicles, pickups and minivans.
“Regulation is playing less of a role than it used to with regard to technology. The technology is moving so fast, and the government can’t keep up with it,” said Jim Vondale, director of Ford Motor Co.’s Automotive Safety Office.
One of the biggest jumps has been in an offshoot of ABS: electronic stability control, which uses ABS speed sensors to determine when a wheel is about to lose control and applies the brakes. The Alliance reports that 51 percent of 2005 models are available with such systems, roughly six times the level of just two years ago.
And Rader said stability control is even better at preventing crashes than the ABS systems without which it couldn’t exist. Rader said that for whatever reason the auto industry never saw as much of a reduction in crashes as it was expecting from ABS.
But in September, NHTSA released a study showing that models with stability control had 35 percent fewer single-vehicle crashes than previous models without the technology, and the number was 67 percent for SUVs because ESC helps prevent rollovers. A month later, the Insurance Institute released a similar study, showing that fatal single-vehicle crashes dropped 50 percent in vehicles with ESC, and all single-vehicle crashes declined 40 percent.
“ESC is among the rare features that provide a huge safety benefit. There are very few members of that league; seat belts and air bags are about the only other features that offer that big of a safety benefit,” Rader said.
Automakers are responding. Ford has migrated its high-level ESC system, Roll Stability Control, from the Volvo XC90 to five other SUV models. General Motors will make its system, StabiliTrak, standard in all SUVs by 2007 and all vehicles by 2010.
“It takes a little while and it takes the suppliers a while to catch up, but when you get those kind of results it’s obvious what we’re going to do,” said Alan Adler, GM manager of product safety communications.
Consumer demand is also driving safety, as evidenced by record seat-belt usage of 80 percent, Shosteck said.
Vondale suggested that high seat-belt use might be an indicator not only of consumer awareness of safety, but also a driver of it.
“As people become more accustomed to wearing a safety belt and have a recognition that a safety belt enhances their level of safety in the car, that may bring along with it a realization that, hey, maybe there are other things I can use or other things I can do,” he said.
Among the next steps in safety are crash-avoidance systems. As a broad group, these include ESC with pro-active systems such as backup warnings and Infiniti’s lane-departure warning, which uses a camera to recognize lane markings and warns a driver when a car leaves the lane without a turn signal on.
“They’re in low-volume, high-end vehicles, because it’s really hard for the government to regulate these things because of the cost of putting them into vehicles,” Adler said.
Tyson said NHTSA has not determined the extent to which it will regulate crash avoidance systems. “I’m not sure we want to make that leap yet. [But] we’re fairly impressed with some of the tests out there, such as electronic stability control,” he said.
Vondale said other safety advances on the horizon include designing cars to better protect elderly passengers, and refining systems that can sense the relative size and age of a passenger.
Of course, through all of the technical advances, the safest car is still the one with the safest driver.
“Safety is a shared responsibility between the automakers and the government and the public,” Shosteck said. “We need consumers to meet us halfway, and that means buckling up every time. We need drivers to not drive drowsy or distracted or impaired.
“Without altering vehicles one more inch, without adding one more piece of technology, if every American buckled up, we’d save 7,000 more lives a year,” he said.
