Car Industry "Buried Report Showing US Car Safety Flaws Over Fears For TTIP Deal" 181
schwit1 writes: The American auto industry has been accused of withholding a report that showed U.S. cars are substantially less safe than their European counterparts. It is alleged that releasing the study would hamper the drive to harmonize safety standards as part of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) deal. The research was commissioned by the car industry to show that EU and US safety standards were similar, but the research actually showed that American models are much less safe when it comes to front-side collisions. András Bálint, Traffic Safety Analyst at Chalmers, told the Independent: “The results of our study indicate that there is currently a risk difference with respect to the risk of injury given a crash between EU specification cars and US models. Therefore, based on these results, immediate recognition of US vehicles in the EU could potentially result in a greater number of fatalities or serious injuries in road traffic. The potential impact is difficult to quantify because it depends on a number of other parameters.”
Hmmmm (Score:2)
Re:Hmmmm (Score:5, Informative)
I actually like the IIHS. Their goal is to reduce the costs of insurance payments. That means they look at both the low-speed and the high-speed modes, low speed to minimize crash damage, and the high-speed to minimize passenger injuries. They're not beholden to the automakers and they're not government, so they can develop new tests whenever they want and the results of those tests push manufacturers to make their cars safer to try to avoid bad press.
It's one of the few instances where the private sector 'regulation' works better than public sector.
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The USA has higher healthcare costs per capita for worse outcomes than almost any other developed nation.
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I had a very similar experience a couple of years ago at this hospital in China [foshan.gov.cn], and paid almost exactly the same amount as you did.
The facilities and the care I received there were just as good as anything I've seen in the US or Europe.
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So yes, we can drive the cost of our health system way down by cutting socialized and legally required health insurance. But the people at the bottom level will simply die. You may be happy with that, the rest of us are not.
And if you counter that people will not be refused at hospitals - that's only true because the hospital can offset the expenses from destitute pat
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Obviously the thought never occurred that some people are able to pay their own way and don't have to leech off someone else.
No, that can never be the case. Everyone should be dependent on the government to tell them how to spend their money, right?
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Re:Well, that was quick (Score:4, Informative)
Hey, the US car makers bought de-regulation fair and square, and politicians keep telling us de-regulation leads to better products.
Why do you hate freedom?
If car makers had to adhere to real regulations that would be like communism.
The market will resolve this, right? People will choose the safer cars?
Oh, that's right .. they don't want us to know which are the safer cars. Why have a free market when you can simply suppress the information?
Re:Well, that was quick (Score:4, Insightful)
The market will resolve this, right? People will choose the safer cars?
Most drivers don't much care about safety, because they don't expect to be in a crash where it makes a difference... and most of those won't be. That doesn't mean they'll buy a car with a spke sticking out of the steering wheel, but cars became 'safe enough' long ago.
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Not sure how true this is, but I've heard In the 50's and 60's, cars had those biiig steering wheels on a center spoke, and in the days where 'seat belt' meant 'lap belt', in a front end collision, that's exactly what would happen; the driver could easily be impaled on that center spoke, even in a low speed crash.
(my only frame of reference here was a 1966 merc comet that I drove in highschool, and that steering wheel seemed like a death trap.)
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>The driver could easily be impaled on that center spoke
Either that or the protruding knobs on the radio and HVAC would pierce your skull. Or the non-safety glass slice you into about 5 X 10^3 pieces. Or the (Hot! Heavy! Sharp!) 351 cubic inch V-8 engine block crashed through the firewall and landed in your lap. Or the bench seat came loose from the floor and crushed you against the dashboard/windshield.
I kid you not; that kind lethal ornamentation, underdesigned fastening, or bad glass got designed OUT
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Either that or the protruding knobs on the radio and HVAC would pierce your skull.
Ah, yes. That was back in the days when the Jensen FF, the first road car with AWD and ABS, couldn't be sold in America because the US government didn't like the shape of the dashboard switches...
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I've seen an accident where that's exactly what happened. Not pretty.
The cops and EMTs told me that the driver hadn't even been going that fast, and if he'd been wearing a proper seatbelt, he likely would have simply walked away.
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Re:Well, that was quick (Score:4, Interesting)
The VW cheating resulted in two positive outcomes for the public. First, buyers have to pay far less environmental tax. Second, since the engine runs much more efficient in normal mode, resulting in lower diesel consumption. So they did most of their customers a favor while pissing off the authorities.
I'd say having a bad crash safety record is a lot worse than that.
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let's not pretend that any actual harm has been caused.
Current estimate is on the order of ~4,000 deaths, using the standard actuarial life expectancy tables. But sure, lets go with "no actual harm" instead - it does sound a lot better in a soundbite.
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If that estimate were even remotely accurate, lorries and buses have already killed far more people than are alive today.
I presume this is like the often-quoted British study which showed that traffic pollution caused something like 20,000 deaths a year.
Except, when you actually read it, you found that the half of those deaths attributed to non-diesel vehicles was just a number pulled out of their butt because there was no actual valid data to base it on, and most of the 20,000 deaths were people who would were desperately sick and would have died soon anyway.
As you say, when you add up all these 'studies', you find that the
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More to the point (if you're bringing up british studies), NOX and PM10 maps of british cities _pre_ NOX regulations going live in europe show that NOX levels are only a problem in urban (not suburban or rural) areas and that cars only accounted for half of it back then (it's about 1/3 now) with the rest coming from gas/oil heating and other stationary sources..
Britain doesn't have the inversion layers that pervade LA county or the CA central valley, but it's clear that "one size fits all" emissions regulat
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comparable to a ten year old car.
I once failed a visual inspection for emissions (they don't generally test tailpipe) and so they tested my tailpipe. The results were either poorly calibrated (it was the best machine of its kind in the state), or my 30 year old car met new-car standards. Still failed, as they found a part in the visual inspection that wasn't "approved" (there is no approval process, and the list of approved mods is zero, it's an anti-mod law, not an emissions law).
The myth of "old cars pollute" is false. Bad cars pollu
Re:Well, that was quick (Score:4, Interesting)
I wouldn't jump to the conclusion that US automakers are so much more dangerous than European cars. In public crash testing by say IIHS and NHTSA, there are differences but nothing to be alarmed about. But in any particular study, if you run 20 tests, you are bound to find something alarming at the 5% level of statistical significance.
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Retaliation for the whole emissions standard thing.
Not that either is ok: neither should VW have cheated, nor the U.S. automakers ever have been so lax w/r to crash safety.
more likely the VW emissions thing was a pre-emptive strike designed to bury this news - and it mostly worked. There are rumours that various govts knew about the emissions test issues for years...
Either way politics and TTIP are behind it all
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That's a load of crap! Cars today I much, much lighter than they were 40 years ago, yet, much safer as well. The fact is that what makes a car safe is a rigid cabin and a malleable outer shell (the so called crumple zone).
You sound like an ex-coworker of mine that said the only way to keep a car planted on the ground is by making it heavier. Oh please, it's like we're in Redneck Engineering 101.
Re:Well, that was quick (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, you're wrong about cars being lighter. Cars 40 (really more like 45: 40 years ago was just after the OPEC crisis when suddenly Honda Civics became all the rage) years ago were about the same weight as cars now--roughly 3000 pounds. Google it. Cars back then had somewhat heavier body panels and frames, but a lot less other stuff: interior parts, safety equipment, air conditioning, power steering, etc. Cars probably reached a minimum weight in the late 70s and 80s, and have been climbing back up in weight since then, though they've probably gone back down a bit in recent years thanks to higher use of aluminum and high-strength steels.
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My 1980 Honda Civic (with comfortable seating for 4 6'2" adults) weighed something ridiculous like 1600lbs before the people got in it.
10 years later, a "super lightweight" Mazda Miata was tipping the scales around 2200lbs.
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Wow, yet another /. poster who assumes that everybody is arguing with them... just throwing some data out there - facts are impartial, they aren't always thrown out there to make people look bad - these are facts from my life, not some crap I looked up on Wikipedia.
I thought I was agreeing with you, but, if you'd rather, take it as an argument and vent some more.
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Err no more mass is definitely not what is needed. All that does is reduce the effectiveness of crumple zones in absorbing the force. Airbags and safety features yet, but ultimately these are a pittance in emissions compared to say ... giving a fat person a lift to work.
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So you're simply prioritising one life over another. Now if the SUV had the same mass of a SMART car then both would have an equally improved chance of survival as crumple zones are able to absorb a larger portion of the total kinetic energy available.
The result for the people in the SMART car is the same, but if your SUV drove into for instance a tree they'd be worse off.
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It's a form of tragedy of the commons, but harder to explain because the resource isn't grass, but safety. Everyone in SUVs is the worst case for everyone. Everyone in SMART is best for everyone, but when everyone else is in a SMART, the lone defector will see an improvement.
Hmmm, perhaps more a pri
Re:Well, that was quick (Score:5, Insightful)
You're an idiot, and the fact you're been modded "insightful" for what the other responder rightfully calls "Redneck Engineering" is proof that Slashdot is not "news for nerds" any more.
Airbags, brakes, and complex suspension doesn't add a large amount of mass to a car (longer crumple zones and sturdier roll cages do though). Modern, more complex suspensions are actually lighter than the shitty old live-axle suspensions vehicles used to have, and have much lower unsprung mass, but the reason they're used is to improve handling, not to make the car more crashworthy (though this does help avoid crashes). Better brakes do add more unsprung mass but again help avoid crashes.
Americans do spend more time in their cars, and accordingly, you'd think they'd want cars that allow them to survive crashes better. There's no conflict between comfort and crashworthiness; after all, Americans have no problem buying giant, gas-guzzling SUVs which certainly have a mass advantage. The engineering conflict with crashworthiness is with fuel economy, as extra mass works directly against that. However, European cars are obviously safer, even though fuel economy is a much bigger concern in Europe due to higher gas prices as well as higher taxes on vehicles with larger engines. But despite those factors, the Europeans seem to do a much better job engineering cars for crashes than Americans.
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Better brakes do add more unsprung mass but again help avoid crashes.
Well, better brakes can drop weight. Going from heavy drums to a lighter disk system can drop weight and improving braking at the same time, but most drum systems weren't heavy, they were pretty light and crappy. The 4-wheel drums on my VW bug were pretty light, but so was the car. My rear drums on my 1987 Oldsmobile Cutlass Calais were heavy and couldn't stop the car. The car would get noticeable brake fade in a single stop from highway speeds to a stop, especially in things like an off-ramp where it a
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That's why Volvo and such did so well in the '80s. There was a perception they were more crash worthy, despite no better crash test results.
They were much more crashworthy, it's just that the US tests sucked (and still do, for NHTSA tests).
Oh, and US consumers don't care about rating. They think that they'll buy a bigger car and get safety through mass.
A lot of US consumers are like this, but the Volvo buyers aren't, nor is anyone who pays attention to IIHS tests.
It's not the engineers or car companies can
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A lot of US consumers are like this, but the Volvo buyers aren't, nor is anyone who pays attention to IIHS tests.
No, the Volvo buyers are more likely to buy safe so they drive unsafe. They don't need to drive safe, they have a safe car.
It doesn't seem to be working. Foreign cars seem to dominate auto sales.
I never said it was a good idea. I never said it worked. It worked for a while. But Toyota and others built here, and got around the rules and knocked the Big 2 off their perches. Well, that and bad management. Ford is thick with incompetent nepotism, and GM with bureaucrats that don't know anything about cars.
Re:Well, that was quick (Score:4, Informative)
How did such obvious complete horseshit get modded up as Insightful?
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How did such obvious complete horseshit get modded up as Insightful?
/me looks up at your User ID
Er, you must be new here?
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Some days I wonder about that myself.
Details (Score:2)
I read the article and I'm a little confused. The article sounds like the US cars met the US based-standards, but not the EU ones. In an effort to bring the US standards in line with the EU ones, a test was done to see if the current US models would pass the EU test, but they weren't able. Not only that, but that the US-produced models that are supposed to meet EU regulations weren't able as well, with US based models 33% more likely to be harmful to the passengers in a front-end collision. However, I a
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My guess is that US models currently aren't allowed on EU roads (because they don't pass EU tests), but under TTIP Europe would be forced to allow them to be sold based on their passing of only the "lowest common denominator" of tests.
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The article has this to say:
"under current rules cars sold globally, such as the Ford Focus or Volkswagen Golf, must still be re-engineered multiple times - at considerable expense to manufacturers - to satisfy crash-test standards around the world."
I don't think current model of the Focus sold in Europe is fundamentally different than the one sold in the U.S. (?)
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Re:Details (Score:5, Insightful)
It would cut both ways, as European cars probably don't meet US standards either.
The problem is safety is not a single variable. Improving one measure of safety might decrease another. EU and US regulators simply have different concerns about what is safe. EU regulators are concerned about pedestrian collisions, but making a car safer for pedestrians might make for worse accidents when you run into a Hummer.
There are other factors too, like US regulators test for what happens when people don't wear seatbelts, in the EU they just assume people do (because oddly Europeans actually use the things).
Re:Details (Score:4, Insightful)
Go with the cynical view: the goal is to make the weaker US standards appear compliant with/equal to the stronger EU standards so the US makers could sell to Europe under a negotiated treaty.
Short version, "we're already risking American lives by having less safety, so why not risk EU lives and pretend the safety standards are the same".
This way instead of building one set to Euro-spec, and one to US-spec, you get the US-spec certified as "close enough". In the process you undermine the Euro-spec.
It's using a treaty to make an end-run around regulations, which is what most of these damned treaties seem to be doing lately.
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Come to Europe and look at the cars. You will see very few American cars and the ones that you do see will generally be niche models. Now it could be that most US cars are unable to pass European safety standards or it could be that the perception in Europe is that American cars are crap badly made gas guzzling turds that won't go round corners.
American vs. European 'safety' (Score:2)
My understanding is that the European safety standards also cover things like the car hitting a pedestrian [euroncap.com] -- do the American standards care about anything other than the occupants of the vehicles?
I guess the new requirements for backup cameras sort of cover pedestrian safety to some degree, but I suspect that the need for it has come from the shrinking of car windows to improve the vehicle crash performance.
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I think safety is great and worth a premium. Maybe if we let cheap foreign cars in, peop
Re:American vs. European 'safety' (Score:4, Informative)
"but a motocyclist doesn't have to wear a helmet."
This is somewhat misleading. Almost every state in the U.S. has some type of motorcycle helmet law:
http://www.iihs.org/iihs/topic... [iihs.org]
For the states with "partial" laws, this is usually the requirement that the rider maintain a $10,000 insurance policy, as well as an age requirement.
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"but a motocyclist doesn't have to wear a helmet."
This is somewhat misleading. Almost every state in the U.S. has some type of motorcycle helmet law:
http://www.iihs.org/iihs/topic... [iihs.org]
For the states with "partial" laws, this is usually the requirement that the rider maintain a $10,000 insurance policy, as well as an age requirement.
The helmets I've seen people riding around with, on motorbikes, here in Canada are typically pathetic and wouldn't protect your head any better than a baseball cap. Just padded beanies.
You rarely see people wearing a helmet that would be legal in Europe or, for that matter, riding a motorbike thats better than a toy.
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Re:American vs. European 'sanity' (Score:5, Funny)
The reason why riding a motorcycle without a helmet is a good idea is that, when you die in a crash, only your head is destroyed and all your body organs are probably available for transplants. OTOH, if you die in an automobile crash while not wearing a seatbelt, then you have probably messed up your internal organs and have lost your chance to do SOMETHING for society. Therefore, seatbelts are mandatory while helmets are not.
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We have big time safety laws on cars which raise the price of the car thousands of dollars, but no real safety rules on motorcylists. It is the law to wear a seatbelt in a car, but a motocyclist doesn't have to wear a helmet. Part of me thinks this is just because we don't want cheap foreign cars competing with expensive brands.
What cheap foreign cars? Chinese cars? Tatas from India? Most foreign cars are more expensive than American cars; American cars are the cheap, crappy ones these days, and have be
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Cars in both places are very safe in general. There is always room for improvement, but if you meet the requirements, and don't make inaccurate claims, then what is the problem? This just looks like an attempt to capitalize on the current VW drama.
Probably. "Hey look, a duck!" seems to be a common reaction when something bad is brought up.
I expect it would be much harder to fake crash test results than to fake emissions results. Even if one could detect that a car was being crash-tested instead of being in a real-world crash, there would be no performance advantage to not performing just as well in real crashes as in tests. Besides, many testing entities procure cars through regular retail channels so that manufacturers can't tweak a particular
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I thought the same thing, but in TFA:
I suspect there is a bias towards driver safety in the US standards, since cars tend to have a single occupant.
Re:American vs. European 'safety' (Score:5, Insightful)
I thought the same thing, but in TFA:
I suspect there is a bias towards driver safety in the US standards, since cars tend to have a single occupant.
This is part of the problem with the TTIP and other 'negotiated in secret' trade agreements. Populations in different cultures and populations have different priories for them, so a government is penalised for trying to be stricter on companies, than in another geography, there is a problem. The TTIP just encourages the lowest common dimonator to rule the board, since that is going to make it easier on corporations, rather than protecting the interests of citizens in a given location.
The only winners for TTIP and the sister trade agreements are US centric multinationals, at least from what I have read.
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This is true - it's a reversion from representative democracy. If we insist on globalizing trade, the institutions should resemble those of a parliament or congress. The members can be directly elected or not, depending on the member countries' preferences. I think the move to knocking down the dubious notion of the "state" is probably a good one, but not it if means replacing it with corporate-backed committees.
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No. Front-side collisions generally happen on the driver's side.
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Right, but the article specifically says "passengers".
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The thick A columns in recent cars are quite the hazard. I find it very easy to not see a pedestrian coming towards me when I am turning left. Blind spots are growing as well due to the tiny windows, and so on. It certainly does start to feel like we are playing an odd game of increasing the number of crashes to get better crash survival.
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Blind spots are growing as well due to the tiny windows, and so on.
That's why you get a car with blind-spot monitors (radar systems in the back bumper which alert you when someone's in your blind spot).
That doesn't help with the A-pillars though. But you can still get around that by moving your head so you can see around the pillar. When you're turning left, this is something you should be able to do, since the car isn't moving. By contrast, vehicles in your blind spot is a problem when you're moving, us
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Also, the airbags are usually not in the a
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I guess the new requirements for backup cameras sort of cover pedestrian safety to some degree, but I suspect that the need for it has come from the shrinking of car windows to improve the vehicle crash performance.
There's some truth to that, but only some. There's *never* been a car where you could see if there was a small child or dog or whatever right behind your rear bumper, while seated in the driver's seat. That's what these cameras are really for: they have fisheye lenses and let you see absolutely
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mounting a battering ram on the front of your car
Those bull bars got their start in rural areas and places like the Australian outback. To keep livestock from going through your radiator in a collision. In the USA, they have become popular due to Idaho Stops.
In American cars' defense (Score:4, Funny)
The Volkswagen computers are only safe in testing mode.
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What's worse, bad frontal crash safety or 4x more NOx fumes? I think it is the former (crash safety). So when are we going to see an $18 billion fine for the unsafe cars?
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I think a reasonable possibility is that if they cheat on one test, they might be cheating on other tests. Maybe American carmakers just aren't as good at gaming the test.
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I think a reasonable possibility is that if they cheat on one test, they might be cheating on other tests. Maybe American carmakers just aren't as good at gaming the test.
Admittedly, its a lot harder to reprogram your car to fare better when smashed into a wall during a test than it will in real life.
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It's obviously not a programming issue but if the test always hits at,say, exactly 4 inches off center then I could imagine a company designing a car to do very well when hit at exactly 4 inches off center even at the expense of say a 3 inch off center collision. IIRC, the Swedish automakers used to do a ton of "real world" crash testing and were generally considered to be the safest cars on the road even if they didn't score as high on standardized tests as other automakers. That would seem to imply that o
Well, no laws were broken on crash safety, so... (Score:2)
it seems like you are just generally confused.
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When a car manufacturer finds a way to cheat on the safety tests.
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That's common sense. But the media inflates everything to drive hits, views, and thus revenue.
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Now be honest. Even if no accident actually occurs, won't you be scared as hell driving an unsafe car?
So it depends on more than just the number of deaths and injuries caused by accidents. An unsafe car is only slightly better than a motorbike.
Trade war (Score:2)
Trade wars generally don't end well.
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Indeed. RIP ./
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Good, I hope this sinks TTIP (Score:2, Interesting)
Good riddance.
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Consider it sunken, but if you want to help:
http://www.newsletter-webversi... [newsletter-webversion.de]
Hypocrites (Score:2)
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Huh? Citation needed.
Usually, if there's some foreign car you can't get here in the US, it's because the manufacturer doesn't want to pay all the money needed to put it through US government crash tests. This usually happens with very expensive, low-volume cars, like the famous Porsche 959 that Bill Gates tried importing and couldn't get licensed to drive on American roads, so it sat in storage for decades. When the carmaker only makes a handful of that kind of car, they're not going to build 5 extra ju
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For instance, take the 5 mph bumper requirement in the US versus the EU.
Why does that even exist? Because the US insurance industry doesn't like paying for morons who bump into things. Just label an EU car as non-compliant in this category and let the insurance companies add a surcharge to the premium. And leave it up to the consumer.
Different standards, different results ... shocker (Score:2)
So a report showed that US spec cars don't do well under a different testing regimen. OK, fine. That's data, and likely highly repeatable since I assume that there are likely a series of standard procedures and testing regimens that are used to set the standards. Ostensibly, these map to real-world scenarios like frontal collision, side collision, rear ending, etc. The automakers design appropriately to these standards. So If the testing regimen for the US is different, you will get different (likely poor)
It's a moot point. TTIP will not happen (Score:2)
> It is alleged that releasing the study would hamper the drive to
> harmonize safety standards as part of the Transatlantic Trade
> and Investment Partnership (TTIP) deal.
It is a moot point, since we will not allow TTIP to happen, and will not respect it if it does happen, and will sabotage it with everything we have, at every point, if it is forced down our throats:
http://www.newsletter-webversi... [newsletter-webversion.de]
Obvious solution is obvious (Score:2)
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Then please help stop it:
http://www.newsletter-webversi... [newsletter-webversion.de]
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Collisions with pedestrians - EU takes this into consideration, US is minimal
I think this is backwards. The NPR podcast went through a bunch of EU testing for pedestrian safety issues. But in Europe, every nation requires a front license plate. In the USA, its up to each state. And some states, realizing that mounting a sharp, sheet metal blade to the front of a car is bad for pedestrians, they make them optional.
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Instead of using a different material for the number plate?
Mine are plastic.
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Mine are plastic.
What state/contry are you in? I don't think I've ever seen a plastic plate in the USA.
One problem I can see with plastic (I even have this with metal plates) is that the front plate won't last very long under harsh conditions. A few good whacks driving off road and my metal plate is bent to shit. After a few months, it's gone.
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Try mounting the plates vertically so they don't hit the pedestrian end on. Makes them easier to read from a distance too.