Vehicle safety standards have helped prevent many traffic accidents and minimize the harm from those that do occur. These standards set minimum performance requirements for vehicle systems, equipment, and components. They apply to all vehicles, not just those sold in the United States and Canada.

They are based on evidence about what works to reduce crash risks. They are informed by research into human factors, vehicle design, and accident investigations. They include measures that address crash avoidance, crashworthiness, and post-crash survivability, and are defined by statutory authority.

The most dramatic improvements in vehicle safety performance over the years have occurred in the areas of crash avoidance and occupant protection. This is likely due to technologies such as anti-lock brakes and electronic stability control that help drivers maintain control when their vehicle loses traction. It is also due to airbags and seat belts that help keep occupants safe in frontal crashes, rollovers, and side impacts.

These technologies have been driven by advances in electronic and computing capabilities. This enables new systems to work together to enhance the driver’s situational awareness, detect and respond to driving errors, and limit the effects of collisions or other forces on the vehicle occupants.

Crash avoidance technologies are becoming more common and affordable. They are enabling people to drive safely in a wider range of conditions than ever before and to use more of the capabilities of their vehicles. These technologies are helping to lower traffic death rates in all countries. Unfortunately, not all vehicles are equipped with them. Only around 40 (mainly high-income) countries have seven or more of the eight priority safety standards in place, while 124 (mainly low- and middle-income) countries do not have any at all.

The next great area of vehicle safety visit this website improvement is likely to be in protecting people outside cars. This will involve preventing injuries to pedestrians and cyclists from being killed or injured by vehicles in the first place and mitigating harm to people outside of cars when they are involved in a crash with a car. It is a challenging goal because of the complexity of the problem, but there is growing interest in this issue worldwide and there are several promising approaches being developed.

A key challenge is the difficulty of demonstrating that any specific standard has led to fewer accident-related injuries. To do so, one would need to conduct very detailed and extensive accident investigation studies of the types of accidents that were being prevented by the proposed standard. Such tests would need to consider the impact of the standard on, for example, the incidence of bumper underride or override that can cause injuries by damaging critical safety-related vehicle systems needed to operate the car and, in some cases, causing other accidents.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s (NHTSA) New Car Assessment Program is a good way of highlighting the performance of different technologies, but it is difficult to assign attribution of the improvements seen in crashes, deaths, and injuries to any particular technology or design feature. The improvements might have been driven by a variety of factors, including Federal actions that mandated the technology through the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards, additions to the New Car Assessment Program as recommended equipment or through a star rating evaluating a level of performance, and the voluntary action of vehicle manufacturers to add a technology they were not required to add.