80% of South African Cars Are Death Traps
iAfrica reports on CARS' (Committee for Active Road Safety) on-going campaign to raise South Africa's automotive safety standards. The association claims that a recently released report from the National Vehicle Testing Association shows that 80 percent of vehicles on the Republic's roads are unsafe to drive. "This is a totally untenable situation and we fully support them in their call to have the regular testing of vehicles written into our statutes," announced CARS' chairperson Ian Auret. Yup, that's right: there is no annual, bi-annual or any kind of annual testing procedure for South Africa's privately-owned passenger vehicles. Stats on Africa's automotive carnage are notoriously hard to come by (reliable stats even more so). The UN's Global Road Safety Partnership estimates 111.4 deaths per 10k licensed RSA drivers. That's not bad compared to the Central African Republic's (under-reported) 339.2, but it's still a plenty heavy toll for automotive independence.
More by Robert Farago
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Sounds like California. Zero safety requirements.
SherbornSean --maybe so, but Boston is a tiny little city with miserable weather. In Toronto you can hide underground walking in PATH for days.. just find housing and a job that is connected to PATH and *poof* no more miserable winter haha. Though is is so geographically close to Buffalo and Rochester NY (the latter of which being where I am sorely located right now), Toronto doesn't get the crazy lake effect snow you hear about for the region because the city is north of Lake Erie and Ontario. It's a very expensive place to live for good reason, it's so clean, safe, friendly, etc :)
i thought this was an article like the one in car and driver or one of those mags a couple years back. in that article it talked about how bad car jackings were there so people where paying shops to modify there car to injure the jacker so they could get away.the two mods i remember were putting a spring loaded steel bar under the drivers door that would swing out and brake a car jackers ankles when the driver pulled up a pin. the other was a flame thrower that popped out from under the drivers door and engulfed the jacker in flames.
Sweet, I love the ankle smasher idea but the flame thrower doesn't sound like a good idea in a car filled with gas. ka-boom When my brother went to Africa a few years back he told me it was insane and a bit unreal driving down there, dangerous didn't begin to describe it. Like rules didn't exist, people drove however dangerous they chose. Unfortunately the value of a human life there is not as high as on other continents, so there is less emphasis on protecting it.