The EU Ensures That Stringent Safety Standards Are Met

Tuesday, 13. October 2015

Whilst I happily sit on the wall over the whole EU thing – should we be in or should we be out, there are certain things that they do that provide us with great benefits. One of these is standardisation. Safety issues sometimes require a group of people to get their heads together in order to agree a standard because clearly we can’t leave things to the individual manufacturers.

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Have I ever told you about the Ford Pinto back in the 1970’s? At the time it was the best selling compact car in the US. In fact there were 11.5 million of these cars on the road but they had a major fault. The fuel tank was mounted in the back of the car in a position where, if the car was shunted in the rear, the tank would explode. More than 500 people died as a result of the fuel tank exploding and bursting into flames with many more suffering severe burns.

This only came to light because one of the burn victims sued Ford. It then turned out that Ford engineers were fully aware of the danger posed by the fuel tank but company executives carried out a cost benefit analysis with shocking results. They decided that the benefits of fixing the problem in lives saved and injuries prevented were not worth the cost of $11 per car to fix the problem on all of the Pintos.

They calculated that if the tanks weren’t repaired there would be a further 180 deaths and 180 burn injuries. They then applied a cost of $200,000 per life and $67,000 per injury. They added to this the cost of repair and replacement of cars as a result of the tank explosions and they came up with a cost of $49.5 million but to make the cars safer at a cost of $11 per vehicle would cost $137.5 million so they chose not to repair all the cars already on the road.

When this came out in court the jury found against Ford and awarded the plaintiff $2.5 million in compensatory damages and $125 million in punitive damages (later reduced to $3.5 million). So my point is that if manufacturers were left to make their own decisions on safety I suspect that cars would be nowhere near as safe as they are now.

So on the plus side we can feel comfortable that when we get into any car across Europe we are protected by some very high standardised safety levels. God forbid we ever leave our safety in the hands of just the manufacturers. By Graham Hill

New Rear Seat Belts For Fords

Sunday, 25. September 2011

Ford has announced a new rear seat, seat belt. It has long been thought that rear passengers are not as well protected as front seat passengers with air bags going off in all directions in the event of an accident. So the clever chaps and chapesses at Ford have devised a cross between an air bag and a seat belt for rear seat passengers. It is an inflatable Read more »

New Cars Have The Latest Safety Features Fitted That Save Lives

Thursday, 24. September 2009

One of the huge benefits to buying or leasing a new car is that you will be driving a car with all the latest safety equipment fitted. Even the most modest cars have more equipment than they had fitted even just 3 years ago. The most significant for me is the wider fitting of Electronic Stability Control (ESC) also known as ESP. This system has been proven to save more lives than ABS but isn’t mandatory until Read more »

How Leasing Can Help You To Drive A Much Better Car

Friday, 16. January 2009

What would you really like to drive? Over the years I have helped many thousands of businesses and individuals to drive ‘better’ cars. For some a ‘better’ car has actually been the car of their dreams, for others it has meant a lot more car for their budget and for others the car they had planned on driving but for much less money. Every client has different aspirations and there are of course Read more »

How & Why Pregnant Women Should Wear Seatbelts

Wednesday, 25. June 2008

I can’t believe I’m writing this piece but I felt it should be included. It’s to do with pregnant women and the wearing of seat belts. Volvo, who is the only car manufacturer to have a pregnant test dummy (look – leave it – I’m just reporting it OK) called Linda, it’s true, the bloody dummy is called Linda – good grief. Anyway, Volvo, on a very serious point says ‘car safety for unborn children is rarely documented as foetal injury and deaths often do not show in statistics.’ As a result of extensive tests with Linda they have found Read more »