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Car Safety - The American Association For Justice Report

By John Markus

Republish: EasyPublish™
Published: 30Dec2011
Word count: 520
Viewed: 118 time(s)

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After several years of work the American Association for Justice (AJJ) recently published a comprehensive report about car safety.

The AJJ's findings concluded that the reason your car is as safe as it is today is because car manufacturers lost several high profile litigation cases regarding car safety. The report goes as far as to say that if the court cases had not been successful, improvements in safety, that are now taken as read, would never have taken place.

Consider a few of the major improvements that appear to have come about because of litigation. Improved crumple zones and protected impact cages, steering wheels that collapse in the event of a collision are two. Automatic vehicle control systems, anti-skid brakes and air bags are a few others, but there are many more.

The AJJ report also found that despite vehicle manufacturers being made aware of design defects affecting safety, they chose to ignore them. Indeed the report goes on to say that there were some very easy to install safety items that could have been installed in cars many years ago, and that they were inexpensive to have fitted, but were ignored.

The simple fact is safety features installed in cars not only reduce accidents and lower the incidence of serious injury; they importantly save people's lives. Massive improvement in braking systems means cars can stop in half the time they did 20 years ago. Traction control systems means that a car's computer monitors each wheels traction and adjusts braking to the wheels with the best traction in milliseconds. Anti-lock systems mean you no longer skid and you stop in a straight line.

The AJJ report also states that there have been many occasions when a vehicle manufacturer has denied vehemently that a particular car doesn't have a defect. Even when taken to court, some manufacturers have still continued to deny the defect existed and spent considerable money on making a defense case; this money could have gone into rectifying the defect. Only when the court made its decision, did the manufacturers rectify the defect.

The thing that many car manufacturers appeared to forget was that safer cars build confidence with the public. If the public feels that a manufacturer takes the safety issue seriously then the company will sell more cars. More car sales mean greater profitability, which was what the manufacturer was trying to achieve in the first instance.

It is clear that manufacturers are now fully aware of the serious consequences facing them if they decide to ignore safety over profits. They will be taken to courts and if found guilty heavy financial penalties will be imposed. Above all the cases will be high profile, so it's likely that the damage done to their reputation will affect their profits even more.

One problem is that there isn't consensus about which independent body should have overall responsibility for monitoring car safety aspects. This means that for the time being at least, it is down to the courts to act if car safety is compromised.

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