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
