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NHTSA Toughens Crash Test Rating Standards
mrspoonsi sends word that the U.S. government wants to toughen crash tests to measure pedestrian impact and evaluate driver assisting technology. USA Today reports: "U.S. regulators are overhauling the process of assigning safety ratings to new vehicles by proposing requiring more crash-avoidance technologies to achieve a perfect score and adopting new crash-test dummies to assess performance. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) on Tuesday proposed revising the current ratings system from a single overall score of 1 to 5 into a multifaceted scorecard that would include the score on crash-avoidance systems and a mark for pedestrian safety. Currently, NHTSA ranks cars simply based on crash-worthiness. Five stars is a perfect rating. The number of deaths on U.S. roadways fell to a record-low, based on incidents per miles driven, of 32,675 fatalities in 2014. But an 8% uptick in deaths in the first half of 2015 fueled concern that progress on vehicle safety may have stalled. Under the current system, which hasn't been updated in several years, more than 90% of vehicles earn a rating of at least 4 stars."
At the risk of getting modded into oblivion, we could remove guns tomorrow and life would hum on. So removing them is an easy thing to do to improve safety. I'd like to get rid of those 11,208 homocides. We could also, of course, get rid of cars. But that's no so easy to do as we tend to be very dependent on them. It's very rare that a car gets stolen and you don't know. OTOH it seems to happen all the time that firearms are stolen and the owners don't notice until they get used in a crime. The *practical* implications of removing guns is much less than cars. The philosophical situation is of course much different.