Leading horses to safety

It's inconceivable that anyone nowadays expects to survive a high-speed impact in a car if they're not wearing a seatbelt.

Yet, according to safety experts, there is still a very small minority of drivers who choose not to wear seatbelts. Not surprisingly, those people do show up as a sizeable portion of road deaths -- beyond the level their statistical significance would suggest.

But crash-testing authority, the Australasian New Car Assessment Program (ANCAP) admits that at least 96 per cent of drivers do wear seatbelts. What's more, prior to seatbelt-wearing becoming mandatory in the 1970s, the figure was around 20 per cent.

Whilst state governments, led by Victoria, are pushing for mandatory fitment of stability control systems to all new cars, for the present bodies such as ANCAP are relying on car makers to be pro-active, fitting the safety systems out of a sense of altruism or commercial necessity. There is no compulsion to offer buyers the safety of stability control currently.

Soames Job, Deputy Chair for ANCAP, wants to see a faster take-up of the safety feature across the Australian parc.

"We really need to encourage quicker introduction into the Australian fleet," he says, "and consumer pressure is probably the quickest method... Not probably the most permanent or most compelling method in the long term, which would be regulation."

As he sees it, legislation threatening financial penalties against drivers (and passengers) who didn't buckle up, had a profound effect, but legislation takes a long time to introduce. The earliest opportunity for the federal government to mandate stability control systems for all new cars would be 2010. In the meantime, hundreds of lives would be lost on the roads.

ANCAP is nudging the car companies in the right direction by insisting that no new car can achieve a five-star safety rating without stability control, under the new testing regime that came into effect from the start of this year.

Job reckons that stability control has potential to reduce the road toll by a more substantial amount than Anti-lock Braking (ABS). In this sense, the benefits of stability control will be far-reaching in the same way that compulsory seatbelt use has proved to be.

Paradoxically, Job believes the life-saving potential of stability control stems from the very fact of being dormant for perhaps years at a time -- much like seatbelts.

"One of the reasons seatbelts delivered huge benefits," says Job, "is because people didn't believe in them -- which sounds like double-dutch, but people didn't..."

"The reason [seatbelts] worked so well was that no one changed their driving [style]. No one said 'I've got a seatbelt on, I can go faster', or 'I can drive that much closer to the car in front'.

"The reason people wore them was to avoid the fine.

"On the other hand, we did not get the benefit we expected out of ABS -- and the reason is, I believe, that you only need to use it a couple of times to know the car stops more effectively.

"And once you know it stops more effectively, you can drive to a shorter gap. You can drive with the expectation that the car will stop in this amount of space.

"I believe we'll see some adjustment to ESC [stability control], but we won't see a lot, because it doesn't come into play on a regular basis. It comes into play in more extreme circumstances, when you really need it.

"That one occasion may save you from a really serious crash, but it may be years before that occasion comes up."

Supporting Job's views that, in the immediate short term, commercial incentives can help improve the uptake of stability control systems in new cars, Hyundai has reported strong sales of cars fitted with stability control during May and June.

The importer had offered the safety system during this period, for no extra cost (more here). Sales of cars fitted with ESP (Hyundai's preferred label for stability control), almost doubled in number during this period, rising from 17 per cent to 31 per cent.

Private/business registrations of vehicles with ESP rose from 19 per cent (eerily similar to the uptake of seatbelts in days before regulation), to 35 per cent during May and June.

For all three models offered with free ESP during the period (Getz, Elantra and Tucson), the uptake was dramatic, with private/business buyers of Getz with ESP increasing from three per cent to 14 per cent, for the year to date up to April '08.

58 per cent of Private/business buyers purchasing Tucson opted for ESP during May and June, versus 26 per cent for the first four months of the year.

But Elantra was where the action was. For the first four months of the year, 15 per cent of buyers specified ESP, but during the May/June period, as many as 76 per cent of buyers ticked the box for the stability control system.

Hyundai's Director of Sales and Marketing, Kevin McCann, largely credited the free ESP marketing campaign the importer ran over the last two months for the record-breaking surge in sales.

"Not only have we had the best month ever for HMCA, but there are now more Hyundai vehicles than ever before fitted with this crucial life saving equipment on the road," he said.

So plainly, the market is starting to catch on, but the Hyundai experience strongly suggests that buyers are still not willing to pay for the feature -- a feature that can save lives.

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