New Cars May Help to Minimize Fatalities

If you are in the market for a new vehicle, you may have one more reason to make a purchase: buying a new car could help to reduce deaths or serious injuries in auto accidents, according to Fox 10. New cars tend to have more advanced safety features, which make their occupants safer.

However, this is not always true, as there have been many vehicles released in recent years with serious defects and many cars come equipped with safety technologies that simply do not work as promised. If you have purchased a vehicle and are having problems with any of the cars components, safety features or otherwise, you should talk with an Orange County lemon law lawyer about your options.

New Vehicles May Help to Lessen Fatalities

According to Fox 10, deaths from motor vehicle accidents are dropping. The senior director of crash worthiness at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety indicated that while there were around 50,000 fatalities from car accidents in the 1980s, there were only around 33,000 fatalities in collisions in 2014, which was one of the lowest years on records for fatal car accidents.

Safety technology is largely credited with bringing about the major reduction in car accident fatalities. In the 1980's, there were lap and shoulder belts in the front seat, but cars didn't typically come equipped with airbags and rear seats generally only had lap belts.

Other safety technologies that exist today, such as side airbags, backup cameras, front collision warning system, automatic braking, and blind spot detectors, were unheard of in the recent past, and all of these technologies have both helped to reduce crash rates and helped to reduce the severity of accidents that do occur.

Crash testing protocols have also evolved dramatically. Today, crash test dummies are actual surrogates for humans, with things like articulating spines and vertebrae, so when cars are tested, more accurate results can be obtained. Crash test dummies are painted to provide more insight into how injuries to the face will occur, and there are multiple days of vehicle prep before a crash test including photography, draining fluids, and preparing the vehicle.  There is also more crash testing done for passengers, as car makers in the past would make improvements for the driver but not the passenger in order to perform well on crash tests.

All of this has made a major difference in the way that cars operate, the ways safety technologies perform, and the number of people who are injured or killed in accidents.  In fact, for its 50^th anniversary, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety conducted a crash test of a 1959 Chevrolet Bel Air and compared it to a 2009 Chevrolet Malibu. The test found that the 1959 driver would most likely have been killed in the collision, while the Malibu driver would likely have survived the accident.

Still, there are times when safety technologies fail or when vehicles fail to perform as promised. If a new car begins experiencing repeated problems, an Orange County lemon law lawyer can provide representation and advice to vehicle owners in pursuing remedies.