EuroNCAP on vulnerable road users

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Fri 26 Nov 2004 18:33
EuroNCAP on vulnerable road users - NowWheels
"Tens of thousands of people will be killed – and hundreds of thousands injured, unnecessarily, if motor manufacturers fail to introduce long awaited design improvements immediately, it was revealed today (November 25th)"

www.euroncap.com/content/media/press_releases/nove...l
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Fri 26 Nov 2004 22:11
EuroNCAP on vulnerable road users - philipb
Thanks for the link. It certainly makes chilling reading. I am pleased that my VW Touran has both a 5 star passenger protection and 3 star pedestrian protection.

Safety isn't sexy and not as exciting as scantily clad draped across the bonnets of cars with large engines.

However, the death and serious injury tolls on the roads of Europe are significant enough. I was a junior doctor in Casualty in 1988 and was very pleased that the law that made wearing seatbelts compulsory was introduced in 1986. This had an enormous impact on the number of patients needing facial stitching to repair the lacerations as their head had hit the windscreen so by the time I started work, very few patients needed suturing.

I imagine the NCAP proposals could have a similar effect if enacted. You can choose which car you travel in but you can't choose which car hits you if you are unfortunate to be the pedestrian victim of a road traffic accident.

Women often have the casting vote when buying cars these days so the answer could well be targetting a female constituency for whom safety may be a higher priority than 0-60 times.
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