Ask the Best and Brightest: What If We Didn’t Have Federal Safety Standards?

• Back to Top
• End of Comments

77 Comments on “Ask the Best and Brightest: What If We Didn’t Have Federal Safety Standards?...”

• 	CobaltFire October 27th, 2009 at 3:06 pm
  For better or worse, we would have many more competitors in the Automobile production business. I tend to think we would have some interesting innovations if a startup did not require the massive amounts of funding that are required to design and certify around those regulations. This is not to say that those regulations are not a good thing; but they do seem to be getting out of hand and creating an insular market where only players who are already in or can get massive funding can play.
  Login to reply

• 	Badger October 27th, 2009 at 3:09 pm
  Instead of investing in more engineers, auto manufacturers would invest in more lawyers.
  Login to reply

• 	Boff October 27th, 2009 at 3:20 pm
  I’d drive an Ariel Atom (and a Caterham in bad weather).
  Login to reply

• 	Chuck Goolsbee October 27th, 2009 at 3:33 pm
  …and kill off CARB too. We’d be able to buy all those amazing, high-MPG, Euro-cars that we can’t buy here now, and I’d be a happy man. –chuck
  Login to reply

• 	Mr Carpenter October 27th, 2009 at 3:34 pm
  We would all be better drivers. Why? Because the bad drivers would all be dead.
  Login to reply

• 	rnc October 27th, 2009 at 3:37 pm
  We’d have cheaper cars and much higher insurance premiums (both car and medical). Would imagine that over the long run the insurance would kill any savings. I mean if you look at government involvement car safety regulations and government involvement in healthcare (medicaid/care), there isn’t that much of a lag.
  Login to reply

• 	TZ October 27th, 2009 at 3:44 pm
  Cars would be lighter, cheaper, faster, and deadlier. A lack of standards also would have led to fewer innovations. Automakers have created some impressive materials and technologies in the hunt for better, safer cars while (generally) keeping down overall weight and improving efficiency.
  Login to reply

• 	Autojunkie October 27th, 2009 at 3:47 pm
  Cars would be lighter and more fuel efficient!
  Login to reply

• 	psarhjinian October 27th, 2009 at 3:49 pm
  Cars would be lighter, cheaper, faster, and deadlier. I’ll give you faster, but even without much in the way of regulation, cars have tended towards heavy and expensive. Heavy and expensive are profitable.
  Login to reply

• 	NickR October 27th, 2009 at 3:53 pm
  Cars would be deathtraps. I mean seriously, they had to mandate headrests? From experience, it doesn’t take much of a collision throws one’s head back. I can only imagine what happened in the pre-headrest era.
  Login to reply

• 	jaydez October 27th, 2009 at 3:54 pm
  People would be (more) attentive on the road beacause in the event of an accident they know the car would kill them, not save them. I’m for a world like that.
  Login to reply

• 	Joe McKinney October 27th, 2009 at 3:55 pm
  A while back you posted the video of the off-set front crash test between the 1959 Impala and the 2009 Malibu. Without all the regulations modern cars would probably be closer to the 1959 Impala. There would be exceptions. Mercedes introduced crumple zones in 1959 and was trying to build safer cars without any government mandate.
  Login to reply

• 	superbadd75 October 27th, 2009 at 3:56 pm
  Two words; Tata Nano.
  Login to reply

• 	TZ October 27th, 2009 at 3:56 pm
  psarhjinian : October 27th, 2009 at 3:49 pm I’ll give you faster, but even without much in the way of regulation, cars have tended towards heavy and expensive. Heavy and expensive are profitable. It’s relative. Even large cars without mandated safety equipment would be lighter and cheaper than their non-regulated counterparts. If you don’t have to include four airbags and related hardware and software in your design, your car doesn’t cost as much to build and doesn’t weigh as much as a car without them.
  Login to reply

• 	carve October 27th, 2009 at 4:00 pm
  My first car was a 1991 S-10. Arguably, one of the least safe vehicles made in 91. My parents recommended it because it was cheap and they wanted a truck around. I think (hope?) if they had access to numbers about safety, and knew better, they wouldn’t have approved. Back in the 1950’s, public perception is that if a car had safety features like seat belts, it must be compensating for something and be inherently unsafe. When talking to people about cars, safety seldom comes up, and when it does it’s usually either a low priority, or based on bad assumptions (like safety is dependent on size and nothing else) The point: people don’t know crap about safety. If it doesn’t help sell cars, not many automakers would invest money in it. A lot more people would be dead. Of course, this is sort of protecting people from themselves which I have mixed feelings about. Then again, most people probably think of cars as equally safe, and regs just help make this closer to the truth. Also, those of us who make safety a priority wouldn’t have as many options.
  Login to reply

• 	carguy October 27th, 2009 at 4:04 pm
  There are very good reasons for regulating car safety more than other goods: An unsafe and defective car can kill you and it is beyond the average buyer to assess if a car is safe or not (particularly when they face the onslaught of manufacturer marketing). If a consumer cannot evaluate the risk they are taking by saving a few dollars then the market for cars would not be “free” (in the economist definition that perfect information is one of the assumptions of a free market). That is also why we regulate who can be a doctor or surgeon and who can fly a plane. And for those of you whose libertarian ideals are offended by such government intrusion: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QDv4sYwjO0
  Login to reply

• 	psarhjinian October 27th, 2009 at 4:05 pm
  If you don’t have to include four airbags and related hardware and software in your design, your car doesn’t cost as much to build and doesn’t weigh as much as a car without them. Airbags are not that massive, but a cheap, heavy and crude body-on-frame chassis certainly is. Much as we malign modern car’s safety-related weight, what we’d get, if GM (for example) had it’s way would be a Tahoe-based sedan made from pot-metal that weighed six thousand pounds. Remember that, before regulatory and economic pressures took hold, American cars were well on the way to being land barges.
  Login to reply

• 	sfdennis1 October 27th, 2009 at 4:10 pm
  Several thousand additional people would be stone cold DEAD, due to unsafe, and underengineered cars, period. The ONLY thing most auto manufacturers persue of their own volition is a PROFIT, and if some of the unwashed masses have to die behind the wheel..well, that’s too bad….we’d have roads full of the modern-day equivalents of exploding Pintos, ‘60-63 swing-arm Corvairs, and ‘the driver IS the crumple zone’ VW Microbuses. Vehicular carnage.
  Login to reply

• 	Robert Schwartz October 27th, 2009 at 4:11 pm
  “Cars would be deathtraps. I mean seriously, they had to mandate headrests?” No. Back in the early 90s, they did not mandate air-bags. The bags were optional in many cars, and the option became very popular. They mandated bags after it was hard to find a new car without them.
  Login to reply

• 	carve October 27th, 2009 at 4:19 pm
  LOL…I said… [i]When talking to people about cars, safety seldom comes up, and when it does it’s usually either a low priority, or based on bad assumptions (like safety is dependent on size and nothing else)[/i] and a few posts later, psarhjinian said… [i]Much as we malign modern car’s safety-related weight, what we’d get, if GM (for example) had it’s way would be a Tahoe-based sedan made from pot-metal that weighed six thousand pounds. Remember that, before regulatory and economic pressures took hold, American cars were well on the way to being land barges.[/i] Exhibit A, folks. Mass helps in a multi-vehicle collision all else being equal, but when all cars are heavy it buys you nothing, and buys you nothing in single-car collisions except for MORE energy to disappate. The design and features are more important. Ironically, many posters said cars would be much lighter without safety requirements.
  Login to reply

• 	jmo October 27th, 2009 at 4:20 pm
  if GM (for example) had it’s way would be a Tahoe-based sedan made from pot-metal that weighed six thousand pounds. HAH!! Also, people talk about the dead and that’s a tragedy. But, there would also be 100’s of thousands more left severly disabled.
  Login to reply

• 	MBella October 27th, 2009 at 4:25 pm
  Robert Schwart: “No. Back in the early 90s, they did not mandate air-bags. The bags were optional in many cars, and the option became very popular. They mandated bags after it was hard to find a new car without them.” But even in the early ’90s, either airbags or automatic seat belts had to be present.
  Login to reply

• 	elloh7 October 27th, 2009 at 4:25 pm
  What If We Didn’t Have Federal Safety Standards? There would be alot fewer idiots on the road, in general, as a natural consequence of being killed off by their stupidity.
  Login to reply

• 	John Horner October 27th, 2009 at 4:25 pm
  Cars would be cheaper and more people would die and/or be injured on the roads. “No. Back in the early 90s, they did not mandate air-bags. The bags were optional in many cars, and the option became very popular. They mandated bags after it was hard to find a new car without them.” Not true at all. During the transition period auto makers had a choice of those horrible motorized seat belts OR airbags. Massive numbers of cars came with those terrible rip-your-ear-off belts until the law changed to not make it an either-or option. The notion that the air bag requirement was but a rubber stamp approving what the buying public had already moved to is fantasy. “There would be alot fewer idiots on the road, in general, as a natural consequence of being killed off by their stupidity.” And a whole lot of dead and injured innocent victims of the stupid people. Very often the driver who causes the accident isn’t the one who gets the worst of it.
  Login to reply

• 	JTParts October 27th, 2009 at 4:26 pm
  It’s a tough question. Ultimately I think you would have choice. The market would really play a part in what path builders follow. Volvo for example always concentrated on safety, people that make that a priority would gravitate towards that brand. I like the idea of a lower hurdle for new comers. One of the big problems with the corporate landscape we have now is that the little guy can really never enter an established market.
  Login to reply

• 	geeber October 27th, 2009 at 4:33 pm
  Robert Schwartz: No. Back in the early 90s, they did not mandate air-bags. The bags were optional in many cars, and the option became very popular. If I recall correctly, the government mandated automatic passive safety restraints in vehicles. Air bags were one way of meeting this standard; motorized safety belts and the belts attached to the door (as on many GM cars of the early 1990s) were another two ways of meeting the standard. The public overwhelming preferred the air bags, so the government simply mandated that all vehicles have air bags. Customer preferences actually drove the final government mandate.
  Login to reply

• 	TZ October 27th, 2009 at 4:35 pm
  psarhjinian : October 27th, 2009 at 4:05 pm Much as we malign modern car’s safety-related weight, what we’d get, if GM (for example) had it’s way would be a Tahoe-based sedan made from pot-metal that weighed six thousand pounds. Remember that, before regulatory and economic pressures took hold, American cars were well on the way to being land barges. American cars have been land barges for decades. Some of them are *still* land barges. The oil crisis in the 70s had more to do with the initial shift to smaller, lighter cars than regs did. Ask Honda or Toyota. Regardless, a chunk of the mass of any current vehicle is because of increased regulations. Crash survivability, crumble zones, side-impact beams, airbags, TPMS, rollover protection, ABS, stability control, etc., have all necessitated design changes and not-insignificant increases in vehicle mass to make better, safer cars. I’m not sure why this is even in dispute.
  Login to reply

• 	Seth L October 27th, 2009 at 5:06 pm
  There would be some really sexy looking deathtraps on the road, and quite a few more 16 year old would never see 17. But man, I can’t stop thinking about how beautiful cars would look. Low beltlines would be back! Oh the practicality front, you could get 3-rows of seats in a mini cooper sized car.
  Login to reply

• 	bill h. October 27th, 2009 at 5:13 pm
  NickR: “I mean seriously, they had to mandate headrests? From experience, it doesn’t take much of a collision throws one’s head back. I can only imagine what happened in the pre-headrest era.” My mother can tell you–her car was rear-ended in the mid-60s, before any head restraint requirements. She had surgeries for some years, but still has pain to this day. My folks never got damages from the other driver either, because the state laws at the time mandated a unanimous verdict of fault, which we didn’t get if you can believe it. But even after head restraints were mandated, most of the ones out there were crap until about a decade ago. Plus, it’s my impression that head restraints aren’t worth much unless the seats themselves are attached securely to the vehicle floorpan. I suspect many cars on the road today still don’t get this right.
  Login to reply

• 	Mark out West October 27th, 2009 at 5:18 pm
  A lot of these safety features owe their existence to insane advances in semiconductor technologies. No processor, no ABS, airbag, traction control, adaptive cruise control, precise fuel injection, knock control, etc. While FMVSS did contribute a lot to safety, the role of available technology cannot be minimized.
  Login to reply

• 	arapaima October 27th, 2009 at 5:23 pm
  People in general don’t like to move unless prodded. It can take the form of how you finish work, organize, clean, or in this case, how you design cars. If there weren’t mandates I don’t think things would have changed much, sure you would have some updates in materials, design, etc. but the fundamentals would be very similar. What would worry me most about this kind of system isn’t my own driving, good or bad, getting me in trouble, but the driving of someone else. Passive safety helps reduce the impact of both your own and the other guy’s bad choices. And I’m perfectly happy sacrificing some things for it.
  Login to reply

• 	MMH October 27th, 2009 at 5:26 pm
  Volvo, as a legitimately differentiated product, would be in much better financial shape. I also choose to believe that the market would have pushed many of today’s safety enhancements – and perhaps additional or different ones that are more innovative – into the mass market.
  Login to reply

• 	Mike S. October 27th, 2009 at 5:34 pm
  Mass helps in a multi-vehicle collision all else being equal, but when all cars are heavy it buys you nothing, and buys you nothing in single-car collisions except for MORE energy to disappate. According to the IIHS, fatalities in single-car accidents also go generally down as mass goes up. From http://www.iihs.org/externaldata/srdata/docs/sr4404.pdf : “The lower death rates in single-vehicle crashes of larger cars are because many objects that vehicles hit aren’t solid, and big, heavy vehicles have a better chance of moving or deforming the objects they strike. This dissipates some of the energy of the impact,” Zuby explains.
  Login to reply

• 	Cole Trickle October 27th, 2009 at 5:45 pm
  People don’t care that much about safety anymore because the required standards make even the worst vehicle pretty darn safe. Way back when, if you wanted safe you had to choose it specifically. Now you get it in Jeep Wranglers and Mazda Miatas like you used to get it in Volvos. Then again, I have absolutely nothing to back this up at all. Rubbin’s racin’!
  Login to reply

• 	wsn October 27th, 2009 at 5:57 pm
  Initially, the fatality rate would be high. But after a while it will stabilize to even lower than the current rate. The less safe cars will have higher fatality rates. So there will be fewer repeat buyers, either because they are dead or they are scared. If we replace “safety” with “reliability”, we can see that no government intervention is needed to make cars better. Car buyers are intelligent enough. As a whole, they make the right decisions, over a long period of time.
  Login to reply

• 	krhodes1 October 27th, 2009 at 6:40 pm
  I think we would see a market a bit more like in Europe. European governments did not mandate anything like as much safety crap as what was manadated here, BUT the various crash test regimes stimulated buyer demand for the features anyway. Within the limits of what European buyers want, thier cars are just as safe as ours without a heavy-handed government mandate. But what REALLY needs to be done at this point is to have ONE set of standards for the civilized world, so that car makers only have to certify cars once. Same with emissions regs – ONE standard! Which we can’t seem to manage even within the US, given that we currently have TWO.
  Login to reply

• 	Daniel J. Stern October 27th, 2009 at 6:40 pm
  This question is difficult to discuss productively because it is too vague. The answer depends on whether we mean “What if the U.S. didn’t have its own unique Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards, but rather accepted cars built in accord with the UNECE 1958 Agreement containing the safety standards to which cars are built for most of the world outside North America?”, vs. if we mean “What if there were no safety standards whatsoever, and it was an anything-goes free-for-all?”. Robert Schwartz, you’re not correct. U.S. Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard 208 was amended in the early 1990s to require airbags as a preëmptive regulatory push, not in response to airbag popularity. Your confusion on this point may arise from the time-limited transitional provisions written in to FMVSS 208 which permitted automatic seatbelts as an alternative to airbags. krhodes1, you are also wrong. The European ECE regulations are quite extensive. They regulate whole areas of vehicle design and construction left untouched under the U.S. regulations, such as pedestrian protection. The lists are different of what’s regulated and to what degree, but it’s flatly incorrect to claim that the European rules mandate “less safety crap”.
  Login to reply

  • 		sir_timbit November 10th, 2009 at 10:25 pm
    	Hey there Mr Stern! What happened to your articles on this website on US Auto safety regulations? Those were really informative. Thanks!

• 	AccAzda October 27th, 2009 at 6:52 pm
  I hate to think the worst of people (Especially on rainy, windy days where its mostly dark, and NO ONE has lights or signals on)… But I still think we (as a nation) would continue to turn into a bunch of SUV / CUV drivin yahoos.. who sue anyone and or anything because some feature hurt their child. Either that.. Or somehow the European way would make its way over here.. and the road would be filled with a mix of current European cars, 70s boats / muscle cars.. and ya average T/B, Toureg, Exploder and or Sante Fe clogging the streets..
  Login to reply

• 	ultramatic October 27th, 2009 at 6:57 pm
  Initially, the fatality rate would be high. But after a while it will stabilize to even lower than the current rate. The less safe cars will have higher fatality rates. So there will be fewer repeat buyers, either because they are dead or they are scared. If we replace “safety” with “reliability”, we can see that no government intervention is needed to make cars better. Car buyers are intelligent enough. As a whole, they make the right decisions, over a long period of time. I would like to know how you can make this claim. Even if this were true, your caveat “over a long period of time” will allow a lot of innocent people to die needlessly because there were no standards by which to judge the safety of the car they are driving. I consider myself fairly well informed on the subject of occupant safety because I work in the industry, but the amount of public information and transparency regarding vehicle safety could easily get muddled by unsubstantiated marketing claims and make it more difficult for even well-educated consumers to make the right decisions. I understand that over time the unsafe cars might be winnowed out, but are we to assume that those initial incremental fatalities were simply on the short end of the economic calculus used to acheive the perfect capitalist utopia?
  Login to reply

• 	bunkie October 27th, 2009 at 7:15 pm
  To answer the question, I’d pose another one: We’d have more money to spend on driver training and actual removal of bad drivers from the roads? I can dream, can’t I?
  Login to reply

• 	Gardiner Westbound October 27th, 2009 at 7:19 pm
  Domestic automakers fought every suggested safety innovation. While the Japanese were calling their engineers, the Detroit-3 were lining up their lobbyists, lawyers and the captive press. They had to be legislated into doing the right thing. Regardless, we have reached the point of diminishing returns. Safety innovations that seemed like a good idea but fell short, like the Center High Mounted Stop Light (CHMSL), cannot be eliminated.
  Login to reply

• 	AccAzda October 27th, 2009 at 7:24 pm
  Oh yeah.. The CHMSL is another straw that aggravates me… The domstics put the third light into the trunk lid.. Where as Honda and Toyota NTM Volvo put it either on the rear shelf.. or (in Vo’s case) actually had the foresight to tuck it into the top of the rear headliner! That… is real thought!
  Login to reply

• 	ihatetrees October 27th, 2009 at 7:36 pm
  Some manufacturers would differentiate themselves by safety. Driving law and enforcement would also be tilted much more toward safety than revenue. And I wager there would be a degree of harshness in dangerous driving offenses that would make a Singapore cop proud.
  Login to reply

• 	golden2husky October 27th, 2009 at 7:36 pm
  I also choose to believe that the market would have pushed many of today’s safety enhancements – and perhaps additional or different ones that are more innovative – into the mass market.… No way. History proves that without a push, it simply didn’t happen. GM fought every standard with every resource at its disposal. Volvo was the exception, and marketed its signature safety systems. Market penetration was pretty damn small…
  Login to reply

• 	Daniel J. Stern October 27th, 2009 at 8:03 pm
  @Gardiner Westbound: Safety innovations that seemed like a good idea but fell short, like the Center High Mounted Stop Light (CHMSL) Your statement is not correct; the safety benefit of the CHMSL has proven to be significant, substantial, robust, and enduring. Not just in the U.S., but also in Europe, Australia, Japan, and virtually the whole rest of the world. @Accords: The domstics put the third light into the trunk lid. Mmm…no. The CHMSL was mandated for 1986. The 1986 Taurus, Sable, Clown Victoria, Grand Marquis, Caprice, Monte Carlo, Cadavalier, Celebrity, Cutlass, DeVille, Aries, Reliant, LeBaron and Lancer, amongst many other domestic vehicles, had the CHMSL mounted inside the car, peering rearward through the backglass. Same in ‘87. And ‘88. And ‘89. And…spend a few minutes doing Google image searches, plee-uz.
  Login to reply

• 	AccAzda October 27th, 2009 at 8:10 pm
  Jesus… I just remembered… If it werent for Nader… Seat belts wouldnt be around.. no matter how much he complained… Not to mention auto up and down windows… And the Corvair.. For all we know it could have been GMs best selling vehicle.. if it werent for those pesky kids!
  Login to reply

• 	SherbornSean October 27th, 2009 at 8:42 pm
  If it were a matter of individual choice, I would be fine with eliminating safety regulations. My expectation is that yes, there would be more Ariel Atoms and Dune Buggies on the road, but that a lot of folks would still want the safest vehicle they could afford. Private certifying entities (e.g. IIHS) would arise to give the public sufficient info to make rational decisions. But the problem is that any yahoo could stuff a turbo Hemi into an X1/9 and go thrill racing on public streets, killing the innocent. No thanks.
  Login to reply

• 	AccAzda October 27th, 2009 at 8:46 pm
  SherbornSean: IIHS isnt just a pvt agency… These yahoos are operated by the insurance industry. Nothing I love more than being told what to buy, by the same people who are going to charge me for what I buy. IIHS… is a total sham. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insurance_Institute_for_Highway_Safety The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) is a U.S. non-profit organization funded by auto insurers. It works to reduce the number of motor vehicle crashes, and the rate of injuries and amount of property damage in the crashes that still occur. It carries out research and produces ratings for popular passenger vehicles as well as for certain consumer products such as child car booster seats.[1]
  Login to reply

• 	210delray October 27th, 2009 at 9:40 pm
  So what makes IIHS a sham? Just because it’s funded by the evil insurance industry?
  Login to reply

• 	SherbornSean October 27th, 2009 at 10:05 pm
  Accords, I simply meant to suggest that there would be independent, non-governmental entities that would evaluate auto safety, filling the void left by the government. But I am with 210delray. I think it’s important to remember that the IIHS is funded by insurers, but in general their goals are in line with mine: to reduce losses from auto accidents, especially those involving personal injury.
  Login to reply