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."

Comments

Safety devices

[Anonymous Coward]

Safety devices are a double edged sword. People rely on them to get them out of trouble because they just drive faster and more recklessly.

Re:Why is the fatality rate so high?

[Bartles]

Really, deaths per unit of passenger miles should be the standard. After a cursory examination of statistics it seems it's difficult to find this data.

Re:That's 30,000 deaths people!!!

[rubycodez]

60% were suicides. There were 11,000 homicides. two-thirds of those are in big cities. I guess paying people to have babies by random sperm donors as a social experiment has been a failure.

Meanwhile, I'll be keeping my guns to deal with their uncivilized spawn should they come my way, thank you very much.

Re:That's 30,000 deaths people!!!

[L. J. Beauregard]

60% were suicides. There were 11,000 homicides. two-thirds of those are in big cities. I guess paying people to have babies by random sperm donors as a social experiment has been a failure.

Oh, but abstinence-only edumakashun and defunding Planned Parenthood as a social experiment has been such a success.

Meanwhile, I'll be keeping my guns to deal with their uncivilized spawn should they come my way, thank you very much.

That's a roight good plan you got there, guv. Ship the decent-paying jobs overseas, deny people a living wage because Job Creators, keep 'em barefoot and pregnant because Shameless Hussies and then wonder why their "uncivilized spawn" are resorting to violence.