Car Safety

[Plus]

EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW : Towards a safer future

Published on Aug 31, 2005

Pichaya Changsorn talks to Robert C Lange, executive director of General Motors Corp’s Vehicle Structure and Safety Integration division, about the latest trends in automobile safety and the carmaker’s current project to assist the government in its efforts to make the roads safer.

Pichaya: What are the current trends in motor vehicle safety and the purpose of your visit here?

Lange: It is estimated that 1.2 million people die in road accidents around the world every year, and that number is expected to almost double in the next 15 years. At General Motors, we feel that we have a responsibility to work to reduce that number.

I came to Thailand as part of a delegation from the US Department of Transportation to do a survey on accident data here.

I think it will take a month or so to finalise the data, which we will present to the US and Thai governments in the context of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum. The Apec members are set to meet in Vladistovock, Russia, I think in October.

The United States is well down the list [of road accident fatalities]. About 100,000-120,000 people die in China every year. We don’t even know how many die in India, and there are about 90,000 fatalities a year in South Africa. About 42,000 people are killed on US roads annually and the number is 13,000 here in Thailand.

These figures concern road accidents, and the victims include drivers, passengers, pedestrians, and motorcyclists. About 60 per cent of the fatalities in Thailand involve motorcyclists. We could help Thai people to understand the data and to work on roads, driver behaviour and equipment.

I think about 20 per cent of the deaths occur during the two-week Songkran holiday period.

Which is safest – Thailand, China or India?

I think Thailand is. India is very challenging. The traffic is even more dense than here. In Bangkok, at least when three lanes are marked the motorists usually stay in the three lanes. Motorcycles go in between, but mostly people stay in the three lanes. In India, you’ll find five cars across three lanes and nobody can move, they’re just stuck.

Pedestrians use the sidewalks in Bangkok and they look, and the motorists look, and somebody gives way. In India, the motorists just honk their horns and they keep honking. I’ve only been in the cities in China, but the infrastructure is rapidly improving.

What are the biggest issues in the US concerning motor vehicle safety?

There are several ways to answer that question. The first way would be to look at data, and say that drunk-driving is the biggest challenge. The second would be seatbelt use, and right now probably the third most significant issue would be vehicle rollover crashes. On alcohol and seatbelt use, those are mostly driver behaviour issues.

Rollover is a little more complex. Most rollover crashes occur because the driver loses control of the vehicle and skids off the roadway and overturns. The accident occurs due to speed and attention, fatigue, and all kinds of other driver-related factors.

But we think some vehicle technologies exist that can help reduce those kinds of crashes. Electronic Stability Control (ESC) is a technology that will help drivers maintain control. In the US, the National Highway Safety Administration (NHSA) is in the process of writing a rule for that to be standard.

How do ordinary consumers know which cars are best in terms of safety?

Everywhere in the world where research has been done on this type of question, larger and heavier vehicles are generally found to be safer than smaller vehicles. Mass and weight are very important in determining safety. The other observation is that no matter how much safety equipment is installed in a car or truck, the most important element is the driver, and how the driver behaves. So, a very safe driver in a car that may not have the latest safety equipment can be a lot safer than an unsafe driver with a car that has all the latest safety equipment.

The way we think about this in the US is that a newly licensed driver who is drunk and not wearing a seatbelt is about a thousand times more likely to be fatally injured than a person who is over 30 years of age and is not drunk and is driving safely.

In Australia, the US, Japan and Europe, so-called “new car assessment programmes” assess safety equipment and rank cars and trucks based on those tests. None of them is really perfect. The tests don’t truly reflect the relative safety of products because most of the safety of the car is a function of how it is utilised and not a function of how it is equipped. And you can’t always believe what the ads tell you.

How safe are cars today as compared to the past, and how will they compare to those in the future?

In the US over the last 20 years, we have had about a 30-per-cent reduction in the fatality rate – the frequency someone is killed when a crash occurs. Over that time period, about half of the improvement was due to the fact that people started wearing seatbelts. About a quarter of that improvement was associated with the fact that the “baby boom” generation matured.

Roadways got safer during that time period and cars got safer. Most of the safety improvements were related to the behaviour of drivers, and a little bit was related to the safety of cars being improved.

From my assessment as a safety professional, cars manufactured today are much safer than cars manufactured 10 years ago.

Consumers are demanding that products be safer than they were 10 years ago, and I think that trend will continue.

When we engineer a new car or truck in the US, we do it to provide occupant protection in what we call a collision locator – a particular type of collision – and we engineer for 122 different locators. We’re trying to roll that out to all of our engineering platforms. Fifteen years ago, we would have engineered for maybe three locators.

How much do safety features account for the price of the car?

The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration just issued a report a year ago that said the safety equipment that was added to satisfy US safety requirements cost about US$1,200 (Bt49,290) for each passenger car. The average price for a passenger car in the US would be $20,000.

I think the safety content of the cars that we sell here in Thailand and in China will continue to increase, but the costs will also probably increase over time because we’ll add more equipment. It will be driven by what consumers want and what they are able to pay.

Do the cars manufactured in the US, Japan or Europe differ in quality from those manufactured here or elsewhere in Asia?

Generally, the cars that we engineer for sale in developed Western economies that are also marketed in the developing world, including Thailand and China, will have the same kind of equipment. But we’ll need to build unique products for developing economies that are equipped differently to have much lower price points to let more people have access to safe transport.

We have a product in China that sells for under $4,000, but we could never sell a product like that in the US because it’s not necessary.

Which kind of vehicle is generally safer – SUV, pickup or sedan? Can you rank them?

In the US, the safest products are the large sport utility vehicles and vans. Even with rollovers, large SUVs and vans are the safest but they have higher rollover rates than sedans, so there’s a trade-off. They are not necessarily safer because the trucks or cars are safer, but because the people driving them are more careful. If you have an SUV or a van you’re likely to have children, and people drive differently when they’re carrying children. So what makes them safe is the way people drive them.

What are the minimum safety requirements in a car?

The minimum safety standards in the US are defined by the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards (FMVSS). There are about 150 of them. Most of those would have equivalent Japanese standards, and most would have equivalent European standards as well. But the US probably has the most complete list. More than half of them are already required in China.

All vehicles in the US go beyond those 150 and some of those safety items are not visible. With seatbelts, one of the requirements is strength. You can see that a seatbelt can buckle but you don’t know how strong it is. How strong is the webbing? Same with seat-back strength. Safety standards also exist regarding lighting performance.

What are the common consumer demands for safety in the US?

I would say that the common consumer demand is for the feeling that they get from the vehicle. That’s partly based on the reputation of the manufacturer, partly based on the look and shape of the vehicle, and partly based on the feel they get from driving it. They want to “feel secure in it”.

In the US, we have a system called “On Star”. It is a telecommunications technique that allows drivers to talk to people in the event of an emergency. It’s a very good feature from a safety viewpoint. ESC is another thing that some consumers are sophisticated enough to look for.

Is there any equipment that can change the behaviour of drivers?

ESC does a little bit of that in that it modifies the vehicle response and driver control input. Saab is working on a breathalyser test. There are dozens of safety technologies that are being researched and over time we will see them evolving into products.

How safe is riding on the back of pickup trucks?

I would say it’s certainly not as safe as riding in the original cab of a pickup, and it’s probably safer than walking (laughing).

Everything is relative and we would rather not see people riding in the back of pickup trucks because there are no occupant restraints. It’s funny that there aren’t even government rules for that everywhere in the US. It’s legal to ride in the back of a pickup truck in some areas.

That was one of the issues we discussed yesterday when we were talking to the national Thai police authorities – people falling out of pickup trucks.

Will we ever be able to watch TV or use cell phones safely in cars?

Motorists will never be able to watch TV and drive safely. Children in the backseat are okay, but not the driver. Drivers have to devote their attention to the driving. We are in the process of doing research on “On Star”, which we think is a safe way to hold telephone conversations while driving. “OnStar” is a one-button press system and the sound quality is quite good. One of the difficulties of using a cell phone in a car is that the sound quality is compromised. But the sound quality from “On Star” plays through the radio system, so it’s quite good sound quality.

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A while ago there was a lot of talk about rollovers and other dangers of driving SUVs and pickups. But according to this interview size does matter.

[Thaiboxer]

Thank you for posting that interesting article. Pickups and SUV's have higher rollover rates than regular cars due to their higher center of gravity and short wheel bases. Still, the article points out that driver safety is the main factor in making ANY vehicle safe. The good thing about pickups and SUV's is being able to see more since you sit up higher.

[Khutan]

It seems to come down to driver behaviour.

Interesting comment about people driving in the back of Pick-up's.