One in three lives saved on Aussie roads by 2020

Cars achieving the maximum crash safety rating of five stars are already accounting for 40 per cent of all journeys on Australian roads, says the Australasian New Car Assessment Programme (ANCAP).

And the safety testing authority forecasts that by 2020 as many as 70 per cent of journeys will be undertaken by drivers behind the wheel of a five-star car. That will have a drastic impact on road safety, with ANCAP estimating death and serious injury on Australian roads can be reduced by as much as a third.

Of course that's comparing predicted numbers for 2020 with known stats for 2001 – a 20-year period. And those five-star cars accounting for the 70 per cent of journeys in 2020 will include many cars from 2015 and even 2010 or earlier, when five-star safety didn't mean what it does now, let alone what it will mean in future, as ANCAP's own road map stipulates.

But leaving aside ANCAP's road map and the sliding scale mooted for past, present and future safety testing, cars will be safer without a doubt.

Presenting its findings at the 24th International Technical Conference on the Enhanced Safety of Vehicles (ESV) in Gothenburg, Sweden, this week, ANCAP even put a dollar value on the saving to society from the improved safety outlook – $2 billion a year.

Over that 20-year period it's natural that vehicle technology will improve considerably, as will road design and driver behaviour. All three elements are set to have a marked effect on road trauma reduction – and very likely as much as 33 per cent, as ANCAP estimates. As we've reported previously, the reduction in road trauma over the 45-year period since Victoria introduced mandatory seatbelt-wearing in 1970 has been an astounding 84 per cent, so the precedent is certainly there.

"As a result of safer cars, the risk of being killed or seriously injured on Australia's roads today is halved compared to 15 years ago," said ANCAP CEO, Nicholas Clarke, as quoted in a press release.

"ANCAP has been instrumental in increasing car safety and this will only increase as ANCAP continues to raise the bar through increasing requirements."

ANCAP attributes much of the reduction in fatalities over the past 15 years to on-board safety features in cars, such as side-curtain airbags, stability control and even seatbelt reminders. Clarke's comments in the press release insinuate that car companies have been compelled to adopt many of these features through lobbying by ANCAP, and that has been the principal catalyst in road safety gains over the past 15 years.

No mention is made in the ANCAP press release of the role successive Victorian governments and the Traffic Accident Commission have played in leading the road safety debate. Nor does the press release note the market forces that ensured that electronic stability control, developed jointly by Mercedes-Benz and Bosch, would be quickly adopted by Benz's competitors – and trickle downmarket subsequent to that.

But there's no denying that in other countries, where vehicle safety is not as heavily regulated, or where market forces are not the massive influence that they are here – and, indeed, where there is no local equivalent to ANCAP – the road toll is significantly higher and the cars there are not as safe.

"Every dollar invested in ANCAP translates to a saving of several hundreds of dollars in societal crash costs," says Clarke.

"We can expect to see similar savings across other world regions in which non-regulatory NCAP programs exist."