It almost goes without saying that safer vehicles are critical component of reducing the road toll. Vehicle manufacturers now commonly promote the safety of their product in marketing material, and authorities actively promote safer vehicles through consumer rating programs and through regulation. But the way in which new vehicle safety affects road safety is not immediately clear - vehicles on the road are a mixture of old and new, and the latest safety technologies are often in only the most expensive vehicles. Most drivers and their passengers benefit from new safety developments only when safety technologies become commonplace; even then, with a median vehicle age of about 9 years, most South Australians effectively wait for more than a decade before they begin to benefit from the latest technologies. This characteristic of vehicle technologies - the inevitable lag between development and benefit - places vehicle technologies in a separate category from other road safety measures. A speed limit can be changed and a benefit is realised immediately, whereas improvements through vehicle technology, while often extremely important, must be considered as part of a much longer-term strategy to improve road safety. The vehicles that are used by the community for business and private use are a component of the whole safety system, but the dynamics of how this component is changing, and whether it is possible to mould the future fleet are poorly understood. The characteristics of new vehicles - their size, primary safety and secondary safety features - are largely determined by a free market, in which safety must compete with other ideas of what constitutes value and satisfies the desires of customers. Yet, it is the new vehicle purchaser that determines the restocking of vehicles in the fleet. A new vehicle owner may drive a vehicle for a relatively short time (for as short as two years in some commercial and government fleets), but the legacy of that purchase will persist for almost two decades. New vehicles are the second-hand vehicles of tomorrow, and the safety features of some vehicles may only be tested out after 15 years (if at all), possibly in the hands of an inexperienced young driver- a driver who may have been barely a toddler when the vehicle was built. In general, there are reasons to be optimistic about future generations of vehicles, and the increased levels of safety they will offer, but there are opportunities nevertheless to mould the vehicle fleet of tomorrow and to create a legacy of safer vehicles in our community. This paper concentrates on passenger vehicle safety. This does not diminish the importance of the safety of other modes of transport, and many of the comments will apply equally to motorcycles and heavy vehicles. But the majority of road casualties are passenger vehicle occupants. Vehicles can mitigate injuries to a pedestrian or cyclist that the vehicle may hit through improved primary and secondary safety features, and so those types of crashes are also within the scope of this discussion. (Author/publisher)
Abstract