New cars are – supposedly – “safer” than
ever. Right? That’s what the government has been telling us.
Each new fatwa – backup cameras,
tire pressure monitors, all those airbags – forced down our throats accompanied
by the ululations of the regulatory ayatollahs that they would make cars . . . safer.
But then the news. Motor vehicle fatalities
are suddenly going up.
And not just a little bit, either.
According to the National Highway Traffic
Safety (there it is, again!) Administration, motor vehicle fatalities are
up by 8 percent – and that’s for 2015, the most recent year for which complete
data are available. Preliminary data for 2016 suggest an even sharper spike –
possibly into the double digits.
Why?
The Usual Explanations don’t seem to cover
it.
“Speeding,” for instance, is hard to
blame – although it probably will be. But there’s no evidence that people,
in general, are driving any faster now than they were three or four years
ago. Speed limits haven’t changed much – on highways or secondary roads – since
the late 1990s when Congress finally repealed the Nixonian 55 MPH
National Maximum Speed Limit.
And that was almost 20 years ago.
The “speed kills” crowd warned of a massive
uptick in road deaths as a result of repealing the NMSL – but it didn’t happen.
Highway fatalities actually declined even as people were allowed to
drive faster.
That is, were allowed to drive as fast as
they had been driving prior to the repeal.
Arguably, the roads got safer because
people could pay more attention to their driving – and to the driving of others
– than worrying about radar traps and being ready at any moment to slam on the
brakes.
Regardless, the fact remains that repealing
the NMSL – and higher posted speed limits on most of the Interstate system –
did not result in a fatality uptick. Speed didn’t kill.
So it can’t be that.
How about an increase in VMT? That’s
statistics speak for Vehicle Miles Traveled – a complicated way of saying there
are more cars on the road, driving more miles. Well, there probably are more
cars on the road right now, today, than there were in say 2013. But not that
much more. Not enough to account for the sharpest uptick in motor vehicle
fatalities in 50 years.
It’s got to be something else.
But what?
Could it possibly be that
government-mandated “safe” cars have become very distracting to drive?
That we have passed a kind of idiot-proofing Event Horizon?
Might it be that the spike in motor
vehicle fatalities is an unintended consequence of serial efforts to
absolve – via technology – the driver of responsibility for paying attention to
his driving?
Is it possible that encumbering cars with
so much technology meant, ostensibly, to prevent accidents from happening has
instead made accidents more rather than less likely – as a result of warning
buzzer/light/vibrating steering wheel overload?
That makes sense.
And, it correlates.
The sudden, dramatic uptick in fatalities
over the past 2-3 years coincides almost exactly with the filtering into the
general circulation of what are advertised as being active “safety”
technologies. These differ from the ones we’re used to – like anti-lock brakes
and traction control and even air bags – which are reactive
technologies that step in (or do something, like explode in your face) only
when the car is actually crashing or on the cusp of crashing.
Eric Peters [send him mail] is an automotive columnist and
author of Automotive Atrocities and Road Hogs (2011).
Visit his
website