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February 25, 2006
WILL SAFETY INFO ON NEW CARS BE ADEQUATE?
Safety advocates have long been urging NHTSA to require car makers to post essential safety information on their new cars, but it took an act of Congress, called SAFETEA-LU and signed into law last August, to make it happen. (See February 3, 2006 “Current Development” posting, “NHTSA Proposing Safety-Info Labels For New Cars.”)
NHTSA’s proposed safety-info requirement, which would require labels with crash-test “star” ratings on new cars, is generally being welcomed, the Washington Post reports,
but “most safety advocates want more meaningful stars. They want some NHTSA tests to be tweaked or changed to make them more demanding and representative of what happens in an accident.”
For example, the Post article says, “many models easily pass NHTSA's frontal test, which involves crashing a vehicle into a rigid barrier at 35 miles per hour. Almost 95 percent of 2005 models passed that test with at least four stars for the driver seating position, which means the chance of injury is 20 percent or less.” This is “grade inflation," according to the Center for Auto Safety: "NHTSA should make the tests more stringent to separate the winners from the losers."
Posted by MVHAP at February 25, 2006 04:53 PM