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Car Industry "Buried Report Showing US Car Safety Flaws Over Fears For TTIP Deal"
schwit1 writes: The American auto industry has been accused of withholding a report that showed U.S. cars are substantially less safe than their European counterparts. It is alleged that releasing the study would hamper the drive to harmonize safety standards as part of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) deal. The research was commissioned by the car industry to show that EU and US safety standards were similar, but the research actually showed that American models are much less safe when it comes to front-side collisions. András Bálint, Traffic Safety Analyst at Chalmers, told the Independent: “The results of our study indicate that there is currently a risk difference with respect to the risk of injury given a crash between EU specification cars and US models. Therefore, based on these results, immediate recognition of US vehicles in the EU could potentially result in a greater number of fatalities or serious injuries in road traffic. The potential impact is difficult to quantify because it depends on a number of other parameters.”
Hey, the US car makers bought de-regulation fair and square, and politicians keep telling us de-regulation leads to better products.
Why do you hate freedom?
If car makers had to adhere to real regulations that would be like communism.
The market will resolve this, right? People will choose the safer cars?
Oh, that's right .. they don't want us to know which are the safer cars. Why have a free market when you can simply suppress the information?
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
"but a motocyclist doesn't have to wear a helmet."
This is somewhat misleading. Almost every state in the U.S. has some type of motorcycle helmet law:
http://www.iihs.org/iihs/topic...
For the states with "partial" laws, this is usually the requirement that the rider maintain a $10,000 insurance policy, as well as an age requirement.
If you post as Anonymous Coward, don't expect a reply.
I wouldn't worry at all. IIHS procedures are very cut and dry. They do 40% overlap and 20% overlap tests. The 20% had results all over the damn place from cars form all makers. If I remember right, Toyota fared the worst in that crash mode.
I actually like the IIHS. Their goal is to reduce the costs of insurance payments. That means they look at both the low-speed and the high-speed modes, low speed to minimize crash damage, and the high-speed to minimize passenger injuries. They're not beholden to the automakers and they're not government, so they can develop new tests whenever they want and the results of those tests push manufacturers to make their cars safer to try to avoid bad press.
It's one of the few instances where the private sector 'regulation' works better than public sector.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
That's a load of crap! Cars today I much, much lighter than they were 40 years ago, yet, much safer as well. The fact is that what makes a car safe is a rigid cabin and a malleable outer shell (the so called crumple zone).
You sound like an ex-coworker of mine that said the only way to keep a car planted on the ground is by making it heavier. Oh please, it's like we're in Redneck Engineering 101.
How did such obvious complete horseshit get modded up as Insightful?
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.