Cars In The Future : What More Can Be Done To Help The Car Buyer
Return to Cars In The FutureFundamentally, no matter what safety systems manufacturers’ offer, consumers need to be told about their availability and exactly how effective a system could be in order to save their lives.
Consumer knowledge is hindered by the scattered approach to the introduction of safety systems. A prime example is the introduction of ESC, which, as previously discussed, has at least 9 different acronyms for what is essentially the same system. This seems highly counter productive to the issue of consumer education.
With the number of ADAS set to increase into the future, RoSPA can envisage this problem escalating, leaving consumers confused by what vehicles have and haven’t got. Consumer knowledge is key to the purchasing rates, and the safe use of active safety systems.
It would be highly useful for all manufacturers to work together to specify standard names for ADAS. The enhanced public knowledge would commercially be more advantageous for a manufacturer than having a separate name for a system in order to market it as a unique selling point.
It would also help drivers understand what equipment is fitted to a hire car, or pool car that is infrequently driven, preventing mistakes and accidents that are down to the driver not understanding what is fitted to the car.
As an initial attempt to help consumers in this area, RoSPA has produced and will maintain an A-Z list of vehicle safety Jargon, which can be found on line at http://www.rospa.com/roadsafety/vehiclesafety/index.htm. This will be added to when more systems become available.
More can be done to push safety up the car buyer’s concerns. Interestingly, a recent study by EuroNCAP looked at how consumers believe that safety is important when buying a vehicle. Work such as this is key to understanding how consumers make car buying choices and what can influence these choices.
In the survey, 83% of respondents thought that the protection of drivers and front seat occupants was important. The percentage of respondents who felt that the protection of rear seat passengers and child occupants was important was slightly lower, at 71% and 70% respectively. Finally 61% of respondents thought that the protection of child pedestrians was important, and 56% said the same for adult pedestrians.
The comparison between the percentages of people who think that safety is important, and the percentage of people who actually look for safety information is interesting and concerning. Only 47% of people look for safety information when they are buying a new car. This seems to indicate a group of consumers who are either, concerned about safety but do not know where to find this information, or who post rationalise their buying decision based on information discovered at a later date.
The best way to influence this group, may be to present them with the necessary information about vehicle safety at the point of sale, and a recent survey by Bosch found that 100% of British consumers thought that the dealer/manufacturer should supply information about safety systems.
It is true that the only time when the majority of the population have interaction with vehicle safety messages is when they are buying a new vehicle. The salesman, whom the consumer sees as a representative of the vehicle manufacturer, will deliver those safety messages. It is therefore important to ensure that these safety messages are both useful and correct.
Another method of ensuring that consumers receive safety information would be to increase the amount of printed safety information at the point of sale. A similar scheme already runs in the UK to inform consumers about the fuel economy and CO2 emissions of cars, at the point of purchase. This is a voluntary agreement by car manufacturers following discussion with environmental groups.
Some car manufacturers already do focus on safety within advertising, however, it could be argued that consistency across all car manufacturers would raise consumer awareness and help to highlight manufacturers who are behind the industry average, as well as those who are ahead of it.
The requirement to label passenger cars with their NCAP star ratings has been introduced in the United States, and from September 2007, vehicles will have to display this information on the price sticker .
Further consumer support could also be gleamed from analysis of real world data. Folksam, who are a large insurance company in Sweden, runs such a scheme. Consumers can download a brochure entitled “How Safe Is Your Car” which gives the relative safety of each vehicle in a crash.
The Department for Transport has also published it’s own studies entitled Cars: make and model: the risk of driver injury. There are two available, the first one published gave information about vehicles between 1996-2000 , the second one looked at 2000-2004 . These evaluate the risk of driver injury if the vehicle is involved in an accident, it does not give any indication of the risk of being involved in an accident in the first place.
There could be some interesting conclusions that can be drawn from comparing safety of the vehicles in the reports with the predicted safety of the vehicles in the EuroNCAP star ratings. A further detailed study could be conducted in this area.
The data used in the DfT reports are old, as it does take time to collect enough information to be statistically significant, and many newer, and safer models of vehicles become available before it is published. Whilst it is a useful tool in comparing the safety of vehicles between 1996 and 2000, it cannot be used to compare vehicles from this period with modern vehicles.
It can take time to collect enough data to be statistically significant. If data was gathered from across Europe then this time scale could be dramatically reduced, and this could be a superb use for the PENDANT which is looking at combining and standardising accident collection procedures across Europe and will finally create a single European accident database that could be analysed.
It could be also argued that two vehicle safety ratings may confuse a car buyer, no matter how much the two correlate and support each other.
However, real life accident studies could be a useful support to the EuroNCAP crash tests that provide a benchmark, and point towards which manufacturers lead the way in good practice, rather than how a vehicle will respond in all real world accidents.
An updated version of Cars: make and model: the risk of driver injury could provide further consumer information.
Research should be conducted which evaluates schemes such as EuroNCAP, to find out how consumers are receiving the messages and how the results of vehicle testing can be better promoted. EuroNCAP is essentially as much of an ETP project as much as it is an engineering project, and there are many lessons to be learnt for the future from this side of the program.
There is little doubt that EuroNCAP has been instrumental in rapidly driving forward safety, but this has been through the two processes. Firstly through increasing the competitiveness between car manufacturers to provide a better level of safety; and secondly through an increased consumer pressure on manufacturers. The significance of, and interaction between, the two effects needs to be studied
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