Safety related attributes of registered vehicles and of vehicles that crash in South Australia

The objective of this study was to characterise and compare a registered fleet and a crashed vehicle fleet with respect to vehicle attributes related to safety. Two samples of vehicles were examined: a random sample of 2000 passenger vehicles registered in South Australia and all passenger vehicles involved in serious casualty crashes in South Australia in 2008-2009. Vehicles were linked with sales and specification data. The resulting data sets were disaggregated according to the year in which the vehicles were sold. The installation rates of various technologies were estimated in each year-cohort of vehicles. In general, the availability of technology is similar among crashed vehicles and registered vehicles for a given year of sale, although ESC equipped vehicles are under-represented in crashes. However, given that crashed vehicles are older than in the general registered fleet, availability of safety equipment in crashed vehicles is less than average. Average ANCAP ratings are improving, but not in the area of pedestrian protection. The full introduction of a safety technology into new vehicles has generally taken between 10 and 20 years. ESC was present in 50% of the registered vehicle sample bought new in 2008 and 2009, but was in only 13% of the fleet overall. Introduction “Safer vehicles” are one pillar of the safe system approach to road safety, common to jurisdictions across Australia. Vehicle manufacturers now commonly promote the safety of their product in marketing material, and authorities actively promote safer vehicles through consumer rating programs such as the Australasian New Car Assessment Program and through regulation. However, the way in which new vehicle safety affects road safety is not immediately clear – vehicles on the road are a mixture of old and new, and the latest safety technologies are often in only the most up-market vehicles. Many technologies are of uncertain efficacy. Most drivers and their passengers benefit from new safety developments only when effective safety technologies become commonplace; even then, with a median vehicle age of about 10 years, Australians effectively wait for more than a decade before they begin to benefit from the latest technologies. This is particularly so in states with older fleets, such as South Australia. This characteristic of vehicle technologies – the inevitable lag between development and benefit – places vehicle technologies in a separate category from other road safety measures. A speed limit can be changed and a benefit is realised immediately, whereas improvements to vehicle technology, while often extremely important, must be considered as part of a much longer-term strategy to improve road safety. The vehicles that are used by the community for business and private use are a component of the safe-system, but the effects of changes to vehicles on fleet safety, and whether it is possible to mould the future fleet, are not well studied. The characteristics of new vehicles – their size, primary safety and secondary safety features – are largely determined by a free market, in which safety must compete with other ideas of what constitutes value and satisfies the needs and desires of customers. Yet, it is the new vehicle purchaser that determines the restocking of vehicles in the fleet. A new vehicle owner may drive a vehicle for a relatively short time (for as short as two years in some commercial and government fleets), but the legacy of that purchase will persist for almost two decades. New vehicles are the second