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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.”
The market will resolve this, right? People will choose the safer cars?
Most drivers don't much care about safety, because they don't expect to be in a crash where it makes a difference... and most of those won't be. That doesn't mean they'll buy a car with a spke sticking out of the steering wheel, but cars became 'safe enough' long ago.
Go with the cynical view: the goal is to make the weaker US standards appear compliant with/equal to the stronger EU standards so the US makers could sell to Europe under a negotiated treaty.
Short version, "we're already risking American lives by having less safety, so why not risk EU lives and pretend the safety standards are the same".
This way instead of building one set to Euro-spec, and one to US-spec, you get the US-spec certified as "close enough". In the process you undermine the Euro-spec.
It's using a treaty to make an end-run around regulations, which is what most of these damned treaties seem to be doing lately.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I thought the same thing, but in TFA:
I suspect there is a bias towards driver safety in the US standards, since cars tend to have a single occupant.
This is part of the problem with the TTIP and other 'negotiated in secret' trade agreements. Populations in different cultures and populations have different priories for them, so a government is penalised for trying to be stricter on companies, than in another geography, there is a problem. The TTIP just encourages the lowest common dimonator to rule the board, since that is going to make it easier on corporations, rather than protecting the interests of citizens in a given location.
The only winners for TTIP and the sister trade agreements are US centric multinationals, at least from what I have read.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
It would cut both ways, as European cars probably don't meet US standards either.
The problem is safety is not a single variable. Improving one measure of safety might decrease another. EU and US regulators simply have different concerns about what is safe. EU regulators are concerned about pedestrian collisions, but making a car safer for pedestrians might make for worse accidents when you run into a Hummer.
There are other factors too, like US regulators test for what happens when people don't wear seatbelts, in the EU they just assume people do (because oddly Europeans actually use the things).
Blessed are the young, for they shall inherit the national debt. --Herbert Hoover
You're an idiot, and the fact you're been modded "insightful" for what the other responder rightfully calls "Redneck Engineering" is proof that Slashdot is not "news for nerds" any more.
Airbags, brakes, and complex suspension doesn't add a large amount of mass to a car (longer crumple zones and sturdier roll cages do though). Modern, more complex suspensions are actually lighter than the shitty old live-axle suspensions vehicles used to have, and have much lower unsprung mass, but the reason they're used is to improve handling, not to make the car more crashworthy (though this does help avoid crashes). Better brakes do add more unsprung mass but again help avoid crashes.
Americans do spend more time in their cars, and accordingly, you'd think they'd want cars that allow them to survive crashes better. There's no conflict between comfort and crashworthiness; after all, Americans have no problem buying giant, gas-guzzling SUVs which certainly have a mass advantage. The engineering conflict with crashworthiness is with fuel economy, as extra mass works directly against that. However, European cars are obviously safer, even though fuel economy is a much bigger concern in Europe due to higher gas prices as well as higher taxes on vehicles with larger engines. But despite those factors, the Europeans seem to do a much better job engineering cars for crashes than Americans.
>The driver could easily be impaled on that center spoke
Either that or the protruding knobs on the radio and HVAC would pierce your skull. Or the non-safety glass slice you into about 5 X 10^3 pieces. Or the (Hot! Heavy! Sharp!) 351 cubic inch V-8 engine block crashed through the firewall and landed in your lap. Or the bench seat came loose from the floor and crushed you against the dashboard/windshield.
I kid you not; that kind lethal ornamentation, underdesigned fastening, or bad glass got designed OUT in the 1970s. Cars built before about 1970 or so would pretty much kill you in a minor crash from which the car could be driven away.
In high-speed collisions (anything over about 30 MPH), those old cars turned you into what my Dad, a forensic pathologist, called a "broken ketchup bottle".
Read "Unsafe At Any Speed" and then follow auto safety progress from lap belts to crumple zones and the rest. Be sure to read about Chrysler's Lee Iacocca getting caught on Nixon's tapes saying, "This safety stuff is killing us." Nice...
Drive Safe!