Safer Vehicles for Young Drivers – Matching Vehicles to Drivers’ Ability

Abstract

Take a young, inexperienced driver and combine with a car that has twice the serious injury rate of a typical modern car - this should make for a deadly cocktail. And yet that is precisely the mix that is occurring on Australian roads. Road safety campaigns around the world have, quite rightly, targetted the behaviour of young drivers and tried to make them "safer drivers'. However, a strategy missing from most of these campaigns is "safer vehicles for young drivers". The Used Car Safety Ratings are a measure of the safety of vehicles, based on actual accident statistics. The ratings are published by a group of government and motoring organisations. A "serious injury rate" is calculated for each vehicle based on the percentage of all crashes where the driver is seriously injured. The statistics are adjusted to eliminate the effects of driver's age, location of crash and the like. These ratings are used to assess and classify cars in the interests of consumers. Three years ago I carried out an analysis of the West Australian car fleet and found that small cars made up one third of all cars built in the 1990s. On average, these small cars had twice the serious injury rate of all cars of that age (and three times that of the latest cars). This means that about 60% of seriously injured drivers in 1990s cars are in small cars. More than half of the small cars on the WA register that were manufactured in 1995 have a serious injury rate in excess of 6%. These models became very popular during the 1990s and, being cheap used vehicles, they are now being bought by young drivers.