Dr. Adrian K. Lund

President, Insurance Institute for Highway Safety and the Highway Loss Data Institute

The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety plays a direct and an indirect role in the sustainability of motor vehicle transportation. To be sustainable, we must continue to make motor vehicle transportation even safer than it is today. That's our direct role. Our indirect role focuses on the intersection of safety with related issues, such as a greener environment through increased fuel economy.

Over the last five to 10 years, vehicle manufacturers have become drivers of safety improvements. For example, auto manufacturers have developed new safety features, such as electronic stability control, and installed them in vehicles without any mandates from federal regulators. Electronic stability control is clearly a huge benefit and every customer should look to purchase this feature when buying a new vehicle.

Vehicle manufacturers and suppliers are leading the curve with new technologies like blind spot warning, lane departure warning, and forward collision detection and warning. It used to be that groups like ours had to advocate for the development of new safety technologies. Now, we're trying to keep up with vehicle manufacturers to determine which ones really do work and to understand how drivers are responding to them. For example, will electronic lane departure warnings work as well as the rumble strips that we have in roadways? Or will drivers turn them off?

The Institute, the auto industry and government must work together to help ensure that motor vehicle safety and the environment achieve a proper balance. We all want safer motor vehicle transportation and a greener environment. We should achieve increased fuel economy through a variety of technologies, such as hybrid-electric vehicles, and not just by reducing vehicle weight, which can increase safety risks.

We have achieved so much over the last decade that it may seem like we have done all we can for safety. Yet, each year, 40,000 people are killed in motor vehicle crashes in the United States. We must not lose sight of that fact. As vehicles themselves have become safer, the environment has grown riskier. Drivers are traveling faster, while cell phones and other gadgets have added to the list of potential driver distractions.

Although the fatality count has stayed within the same range for a number of years, we have seen significant improvement when that rate is normalized per miles driven. Our studies have shown that the fatality rate would have gone up over the past decade if vehicles had not been getting progressively more protective of their occupants. This means that the operating environment has been getting riskier, but better designed motor vehicles more than compensate for those increased risks.

Presumably, vehicles will continue to improve, especially as we learn which crash prevention technologies really work. But as a society, we must also focus on improving the operating environment for drivers, by enforcing speed limits or redesigning intersections. Replacing stoplights with roundabouts, for example, can virtually eliminate serious injuries in side impact crashes.

Ford has a lot to be proud of in its safety history. The Ford Taurus was one of the first vehicles to perform well when our institute introduced frontal offset crash tests in 1995. Ford also helped to focus automakers on driver side airbags and was the first to include a noticeable seat belt use reminder in U.S. vehicles – without a federal requirement. We shouldn't be surprised that Ford, along with Volvo, was the leader among manufacturers in our latest round of Top Safety Picks.

We all know there's still much to be learned and more to do where safety is concerned, but things are definitely moving in the right direction.