Neil Hopcroft

A digital misfit

“In the longer term, CAFE is a deadly blood-for-oil trade-off…It’s lethal effects on vehicle safety were documented in the National Research Council’s 2001 study, which found that its downsizing incentive contributes to 2,000 deaths annually. Its sponsors may pretend otherwise, but the Boehlert-Markey bill would make that death toll even worse.”

…because as we all know that its small cars that get people killed on the roads, not bad drivers…


Categories: Memories.

/ 7 Comments

7 comments

  1. maluse

    Perhaps the people in the smaller cars ought to carry guns in order to even out the odds? That solution will surely appeal to an organisation like that.

    Reply
    • neilh

      Or we could make them have explosives that trigger when they get hit by something significant, causing enough collateral damage that the insurance goes up for everyone…? Think of it as a kind of retstrike, if I’m gonna die in this accident I’ll at least take someone else with me…

      No, I think the answer is to push up the price of petrol to the point that it makes sense to drive a smaller car.

      Reply
      • cally_tmk

        Which seems to be what’s suggested in the 2002 CEI study Short- And Long-Range Impacts Of Increases In The Corporate Average Fuel Economy Standard. The basic idea is that raising the CAFE Standard would result in a much higher ‘cost to society’ (whatever that means) than saving the same amount of fuel by increasing tax on gasoline.

        Also interested to note that the “lethal effects on vehicle safety” documented in the National Research Council’s 2001 study weren’t referring to an increase in fatalities, but to a smaller reduction than would otherwise have been expected.

        “Although many general indicators of motor vehicle travel safety improved during that period (e.g., the fatality rate per vehicle mile traveled), the preponderance of evidence indicates that this downsizing of the vehicle fleet resulted in a hidden safety cost, namely, travel safety would have improved even more had vehicles not been downsized.”

        And not all the authors of the paper agreed with this interpretation.

        Presumably the desired outcome is to have cars that are both safe and fuel-efficient. I’d certainly expect a (significant) increase in fuel prices to lead to demand for more fuel-efficient vehicles. Don’t know to what extent safety considerations affect people’s purchasing decisions, and whether this might be a more relevant area for legislation…

        Reply
        • neilh

          That mostly seems to be conjecture, not an explicit ‘2000 people died’ as was suggested by the original article. Seems also that if everyone were to downsize vehicles then the size differential that is a factor in a lot of accidents is removed…if you’re in the smallest car on the road your at greatest risk in an accident, if everyone is in the same size car everyone carries the same risk.

          I guess safety is exposed to the public in the form of insurance costs.

          btw “National Research Council’s 2001 study” doesn’t link to anything…

          Reply
          • neilh

            The economist would say no, theres no need, just let the market do the right thing….I think theres a place for legislation but maybe thats not in the obvious place. When we think of safety regulations for cars we think crash test dummies and high speed film footage, I think they do a useful job, but perhaps if we include real insurance data from real accidents then make some kind of ‘insurance tax’ that punishes people who drive the kinds of cars that are involved in a lot of fatal accidents. I’m not quite sure how that’d work but I think significantly increasing the cost to insurance companies of ambulance callouts to RTAs would be a start.

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