Democratizing Car Safety

12 March 2015 Back

Democratizing Car Safety

During the launch of its new policy report at the UN in Geneva yesterday, international automotive safety watchdog Global NCAP revealed that millions of new cars manufactured in low-income countries do not meet the UN’s safety standards for front and side impacts.

Global NCAP chairman Max Mosley said that safety standards and legislation implemented in high-income countries are not yet available in rapidly growing lower-income countries.

NCAP Secretary General David Ward, who wrote the new policy report, added that “the drive for the democratization of car safety must now be extended across all automotive markets worldwide. By 2020 at the latest we want all new cars to meet basic standards for both crash protection and crash avoidance.”

The new report offers ten recommendations that can help save tens of thousands of lives and prevent hundreds of thousands of injuries caused by car accidents each year. These recommendations include urging all UN member states to adopt NCAP’s two-stage minimum car safety regulation plan, to participate in the World Forum for Harmonization of Vehicle Regulations and encourage the deployment of new technologies in passenger cars. The recommendations also call upon automobile manufacturers to apply front and side impact crash test standards to all their new models from 2016 and to improve their reporting to include data on the applied safety standards of their global vehicle production.