Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood recently touted a reduction of 700,000 accidents because of improved vehicle design and accident-avoidance equipment. While any reduction of accidents is welcome news, I question the validity of this number.
In the report, LaHood says the "number of police-reported accidents" was reduced. This is a key phrase and one of two reasons I question the validity of the reduction. The reduction of police-reported accidents might be due to the financial woes that virtually every government agency is experiencing. Because of budget cuts, police in many cities simply may not be able to respond to a non-injury accident where the vehicles are not blocking the roadway.
Secondly, with the average age of a vehicle on the road in the United States being over 10 years of age, much of the accident-avoidance technology cited in the report is currently not present in the majority of the vehicles on the road. Blind-spot warning systems and automatic braking are relatively new technologies and are not offered on every vehicle as standard equipment. The only new standard piece of accident-avoidance technology is Electronic Stability Control (ESC) that improves evasive maneuver steering and reduces rollovers. This technology was required as standard equipment on all U.S. vehicles for the 2012 model year. To put this in perspective, when dual airbags became mandatory equipment on U.S. vehicles in 1994, it took until the year 2000 before these vehicles became the majority and we started to see an impact on total loss rates. This leads me to believe that we are years off from seeing the true impact of ESC on accident reduction.
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