Cars In The Future : Consumer Information
Return to Cars In The FutureAs more and more safety systems become present on vehicles, it becomes more and more important that consumers are helped to purchase safer vehicles. In order to do this, informed choices need to be supported and a culture of vehicle aware buyers needs to be fostered.
The current spread and consumer take up of active safety is similar to the early days of passive safety, where manufacturers would advertise individual safety technologies but with no holistic presentation of the field as a whole. Passive safety disseminated through the market place quicker once a benchmark was set to identify good practice.
It could therefore be argued that passive safety didn’t take off as a consumer issue until a system was developed that defined its absence rather than its presence.
The best way to encourage the spread of Active Safety systems is to set benchmark tests and protocols, much like the protocols which have been developed as part of the PNCAP program – as many areas of a vehicles dynamic performance can be compared and rated.
EuroNCAP has already made points available for Seat Belt Reminder (SBR) systems and it seems logical to continue to do this for active safety systems with a proven benefit.
It is also important to develop protocols that develop good practice in other quantifiable areas of vehicle technology, for example, in order to develop guidelines for safer In Vehicle Information Systems (IVIS). Ratings can then be introduced to influence consumers purchasing choices and remove the number of IVIS and ADAS systems that have a higher risk of distracting the driver.
Information about vehicles systems is of course something that shouldn’t just be made available for the purchasers of new cars. There is a clear and urgent need to ensure that purchasers of second hand vehicles also receive the correct information about the safety systems on board a vehicle, this could be a difficult risk to manage – especially in cases where a car is sold privately.
Drivers purchasing second hand vehicles need to reduce their accident risk when using them, and the only practical way of doing this is to encourage drivers to receive refresher training in the vehicle, or on a vehicle with the same systems, as soon as possible. Training will help drivers deal with new technology in a safer way and learn the appropriate skills required quicker.
The issue of a driver not being familiar with a vehicle also arises when hiring cars for occasional use.
Consumer Information in 2006
There are several sources of information available to the consumer currently, although each concentrates on a specific area of vehicle safety and uses different processes to feed back the information, this may of course be confusing and time consuming to a buyer who wants to take safety into account.
A more holistic overview could be presented to the consumer, with information and advice about what the ratings actually mean in real terms. This will also help consumers prioritise between different technologies and purchase cars based upon what the vehicle will be used for.
The most notable source of consumer information in recent years has been The European New Car Assessment Programme. Under the programme, cars are crash tested to see how well they offer occupant protection at speeds higher than vehicles are required to provide for legally. The better the protection the more points they are awarded. This ultimately leads to a vehicle being awarded a separate star rating for adult occupant protection, child occupant protection, and the protection that a vehicle could potentially offer to a struck pedestrian.
The EuroNCAP results are readily available at http://www.euroncap.com.
The protection that a vehicle offers against whiplash is not tested as part of the EuroNCAP program. Internationally, the insurance industry has developed protocols to comparatively assess seats and consumers can find information about how well vehicles perform at http://www.thatcham.org/ncwr.
Child car seats are an important item and it is important that a holistic ratings system is developed and publicised. Currently there are several schemes that are produced on a yearly or occasional basis and reports are available from Which? and the AA Trust.
EuroNCAP also looks at child safety although this puts the impetus on the car manufacturer to design a safe child restraint and vehicle combined system rather than rating individual restraints, and it should not be assumed that a child restraint that performs well in one vehicle would perform well in another.
There is currently a need for better promoted and balanced consumer information in all areas of active safety
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