Consumers demand the latest protection technology

By Dina ElBoghdady / Detroit News Washington Bureau

    WASHINGTON — Americans traditionally didn’t care that much about automotive safety. But the 1990s — a new golden age when auto sales surged to unprecedented heights — changed all of that.

    Today, safety is one of the most important factors in marketing cars and light trucks. And industry experts say that trend is likely to continue into the new century.

    That’s a radical change from the days when consumers shunned the newest safety features as experimental, expensive gadgets with unproven benefits. When Ford Motor Co. offered seat belts and other cutting edge safety devices in its 1956 models, its cars did not sell as well as cars without those options marketed by General Motors Corp.

    “That helped create the impression that the additional cost of putting safety features in cars would not be repaid by the customer,” said Anthony Yanik, a retired GM engineer who wrote an exhaustive study on automotive safety in 1996. “It was really an attitudinal problem that the industry had to struggle with in the early days.”

    But increased awareness of health issues among the general public has spilled into the automotive arena, creating a huge appetite among consumers for the latest in safety technology, especially for their children.

    Safety is a top consideration for baby boomers with children, for young adults exposed to seat belt and anti-drunken driving campaigns since grade school, and for women, who generally tend to be more safety-conscious than men, auto industry research shows.

    GM has found in its research that safety is second only to price in purchasing decisions. In rating the auto companies, consumers ranked safety third in importance after price and service, the recent GM survey shows.

    Beyond marketing considerations, costly litigation battles have persuaded major automakers to cram their highest-selling vehicles and their luxury brands with as much safety equipment as possible, which in turn has focused even more attention on safety.

    “Ever since we started tracking it six years ago, personal security has been the primary issue driving consumer behavior,” said Dee Allsop, a pollster and senior vice-president of Wirthlin Worldwide, which assesses marketing issues for a consortium of automakers. “Safety is now something people want and expect in an automobile.”

    This past year offered ample proof that automakers are listening. For instance, DaimlerChrysler AG introduced built-in child seats in some of its vehicles and launched a comprehensive program to instruct consumers on proper installation and use of child seats.

    The 2000 Ford Taurus boasts the “blink of an eye” safety system, which determines the distance of the driver from the dashboard and adjusts the pressure of the seat belt against the chest and the power of the inflating air bag to guard against injury.

    Today, auto-related deaths have reached historic lows in part because of such engineering improvements. Government regulations and positive behavioral trends such as increased seat belt use (now at 70 percent) also have contributed to the downward trend.

    By 1998 the auto fatality rate had dropped to 1.6 for every 100 million vehicle miles traveled — a three-fold decrease from 1966, when the federal government started regulating motor vehicle safety, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reports.

    Still, there is good reason for continuing consumer concerns about car safety. Vehicle collisions are the leading cause of death for people ages 5 to 29. Crashes claimed about 41,400 lives in 1998, with one person dying every 13 minutes that year.

    To further reduce the death toll, automakers are looking beyond simply protecting motorists during a crash to avoiding crashes in the first place and to helping motorists after the crash occurs, said Terry Connolly, director of GM’s North American Safety Center.

    GM combines on-board electronics, global satellite positioning and hands-free cellular phone service into a 24-hour system called OnStar. When an air bag deploys, advisers at an OnStar center dispatch emergency personnel to the site of the vehicle.

    GM also has installed an ultra-sonic device on its 2000 Cadillac DeVille that alerts drivers of obstacles behind the car when it’s parked or shifted into reverse. Some Mercedes Benz models and the 1999 Ford Windstar offer similar options.

    The Cadillac also borrows military thermal imaging technology for a Night Vision system that uses a grille-mounted camera to detect objects beyond the headlights’ range.

    “There are opportunities in crash avoidance that are at some point going to become fairly dramatic,” Connolly said. “At some point in the future, a crash will become a rare event.”

    Until then, the federal government offers consumers a five-star rating system that ranks a vehicle’s crashworthiness in frontal and side-impact collisions — with five stars showing the best crash protection for vehicles within the same weight class.

    Since frontal crash tests began in 1978, scores have improved steadily. In the 1999 model year, 88 percent of the cars tested received four or five stars, reversing dismal scores of only two decades ago. In 1979, only 33 percent received four or five stars.

    Federal regulators also are busy preparing rules, to be released in March, that will govern the next-generation of safer air bags. The rules will require automakers to make air bags that protect adults and children of all weights and sizes no matter what their position in the seat.

    Regulators also are aiming to prevent the quest for safer vehicles from backfiring on the motoring public. For instance, NHTSA recently issued a warning to consumers that recently introduced side air bags could injure or kill children sitting too close to air bags in rear doors.

    “Manufacturers are consciously trying to improve safety technology to give them a marketing advantage,” said Noble Bowie, director of planning and consumer programs at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. “We need to also consider if there are any possible negative safety effects.”

Copyright © 2000, The Detroit News

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