Abstract
The free market has not promoted vehicle safety design changes primarily because the manufacturers have not believed such changes to be profitable for themselves and because the general public has not shown sufficient interest in safety features to make it profitable for the manufacturers to attempt to satisfy this demand. To the extent that this public apathy is not justified, it may be explained largely in terms of a lack of information on safety performance and faulty evaluation of the benefits of increased vehicle safety. If more reliance were placed on the market mechanism, vehicle safety could be promoted by eliminating these two problems.