Historically, car manufacturers have shown little interest in passenger safety. Perhaps the buying public doesn't always rate safety high enough to incentivise manufacturers. This latter problem isn't helped when the scoring of some crash test bodies seems more about justifying their existence rather than making cars tangibly safer. Fortunately, for the most part, they focus on what's really important.
Back in the dark days of poor car safety, Ralph Nader released a book (in 1965) 'Unsafe at Any Speed'. It criticised the US auto industry for failing to incorporate safety into vehicle designs. He argued that manufacturers put style and performance over safety, causing unnecessary deaths and injuries.
GM's response was illegal surveillance and attempted character assasination. The intimidation campaign backfired. In 1966, a televised U.S. Senate subcommittee hearing confronted GM executives about the harassment. GM President James Roche was forced to make a public apology to Nader on live television. In 1970 GM settled a lawsuit, paying Nader $425,000. He used this settlement money to fund his work.
Had the industry learned from this? Fighting strong competition, Ford hastily put the Pinto into production. Ford engineers discovered in preproduction crash tests that if one was rear ended, it could catch fire due to the rupturing of the Pinto’s fuel system.
Because this defect was found after assembly line tooling had been done, Ford decided to manufacture the car anyway. Ford then successfully lobbied against safety standards that would have forced them to fix the problem. People died as a direct result of this design fault.
How to fix this safety problem being ignored by manufacturers? The first NCAP safety crash test organisation was formed in 1979 in the United States.
This meant car safety was now handled by an independent body rather than manufacturers self regulating, which they weren't doing very well. It simply wasn't in their financial interests to prioritise safety so it had to be done another way.
There was still a problem with the tests not always replicating real world situations. If a car maker simply engineered a car to pass a crash test, that didn't make it safe in all situations. I wrote about this some years back (
click here).
Safety bodies are trying to ensure crash testing is as realistic as possible, encouraging manufacturers to take a more holistic approach to car safety. The problem is safety design and features cost money and car makers are in business to make money. That's why we need car safety bodies.
So it's all good now? No. A recent example is removing physical controls in favour of a touchscreen. It's not rocket science to know that reduces safety but did car makers worry about that?
It seems not. Major safety bodies will in future require carmakers to include readily accessible physical controls for critical functions to achieve a top rating. An obvious move and one that is to be applauded.
Does it takes a reduction in a safety score to force car makers to do the obvious? I won't buy a modern car unless most of the functions can be controlled physically rather than virtually.
As another example, a report in The Guardian in 2025 stated that excess pollution emitted as a result of the Dieselgate scandal has killed about 16,000 people in the UK and caused 30,000 cases of asthma in children, according to a new analysis. So even the welfare of people walking around the streets is of no concern to some car companies.
So that's it? No. In countries with low or non existent safety requirements, manufacturers often take advantage of gaps in regulations to maximise profits. Often, they sell cheaper, lower spec versions by omitting life-saving technologies that are required elsewhere. Stripping out standard safety features to lower the price, because they can.
For cars built for emerging markets, they often design cars having less structural integrity to lower the price, selling more cars and increasing profits. That can involve outdated models that can no longer be legally sold in more regulated regions.
So let's summarise. Collectively, the car industry has never cared about your welfare and they still don't. Regulations force them to make cars safer, not any moral obligation. It's really all about profit and a world that emphasises making money over doing what is right.
