Jim Vondale

In recent decades, the global vehicle safety community has together made significant strides in reducing motor vehicle crashes, fatalities and injuries. We can accelerate this progress in the future by staying focused on the most-effective real-world safety priorities and by harmonizing global safety regulations and requirements.

Safety progress over the past decades can be attributed to a variety of factors, including a better understanding of crash and injury mechanisms, an array of new safety features and technologies, a greater commitment to enforcing laws that address risky driving behaviors, and increased customer awareness of vehicle safety in purchase decisions.

The rate of future improvement, however, will largely depend on how effectively policy makers, nongovernmental safety groups and vehicle manufacturers utilize safety engineering resources. The more focused, aligned and effective we all are, the greater our achievements will be.

To identify the safety priorities that can save the most lives, we must rely on real-world crash and injury data and apply sound science to motor vehicle safety problems. We are most productive when we devote resources to technologies, regulations and requirements that have the greatest potential real-world benefit. For example, there is consensus that crash-avoidance technologies and vehicle-to-vehicle/infrastructure communications have great potential to reduce crash risks for a broad range of driving situations. All stakeholders in the global safety community should be prioritizing efforts in those areas.

Another important way to enhance the effective and efficient use of vehicle manufacturers' safety engineering resources is to harmonize global vehicle regulations. While some progress has been made, vehicle manufacturers continue to face increasingly complex and conflicting requirements and metrics, including two different regulatory schemes that are used globally – one based on U.S. regulations, the other based on European regulations. Local requirements can also be added to these base regulatory schemes, further increasing vehicle design complexity.

At the same time, consumers must grapple with interpreting the proliferating and sometimes conflicting studies and rankings on auto safety (such as government-run New Car Assessment Programs, or NCAPs, and others conducted by private groups), which are based on various laboratory tests with different crash-test dummies, test requirements and metrics. These studies and rankings are a useful tool for consumers, and they are having their intended effect of driving vehicle manufacturer behavior. However, they don't always correlate well with real-world crash data, in large part because driver behavior plays such an important role in real-world safety and can overwhelm any differences found in laboratory tests. In addition, these public domain assessments at times appear to compete with one another for greater complexity and stringency. And currently, there is no organized effort to harmonize them.

While some regional differences in regulations and public domain testing are to be expected, the global safety community should intensify efforts to determine whether all of the differences are justified. Resources spent to modify vehicle designs in order to meet variable regulations and public domain requirements – especially those without proven and significant real-world safety benefits – are resources that are lost to pursuing real-world safety improvements that can save many lives.

We also must not forget that vehicle technology alone cannot solve all vehicle safety challenges. Many of the advanced technologies currently being studied or considered for implementation require decisions about such things as policy, governance and security. In addition, driver behavior and driver responsibility will continue to be critical to future safety progress and will require additional driver education and enforcement. Also, governments need to step up efforts to provide a safer vehicle infrastructure.

These efforts will take some time, and changes will need to be phased in to maximize the effective use of safety engineering resources. But, if all the stakeholders in the global safety community work together to address these important challenges, we will see even greater safety benefits in the future.