That is true, but in that mind your kid in the back seat is safety-critical, so maybe we mandate no kids in the back? Or your wife next to you in the passenger seat, she could also make you remove your eyes from the road (happens quite a lot actually) - mandate no wifes in the passenger seat anymore?
You need to draw a line, otherwise really anything in your car can be safety-critical, you just need to imagine the right circumstances.
I would draw the line at the controls that are mandated by law. Every control mandated by law should not only be mandated to exist, but also be mandated to exist as a physical, easily reachable button.
> Every control that will be used by the driver for any purpose whilst the vehicle is in motion is safety critical.
Okay, that's at least limiting it somewhat. However, what about the setting for Bluetooth connectivity of the radio? It technically can be used while driving, and there's probably a non-zero count of people who have already used such a setting while driving to pair their phone or whatever. What about the time/date setting of the clock in your car? Same thing. Physical buttons for all of that?
> That is true, but in that mind your kid in the back seat is safety-critical, so maybe we mandate no kids in the back? Or your wife next to you in the passenger seat, she could also make you remove your eyes from the road (happens quite a lot actually) - mandate no wifes in the passenger seat anymore?
You're being intentionally obtuse. Like everything else, this is a question of what options we have to make things safer. "Not allowing children in cars" isn't reasonable, because there isn't a simple alternative. Using controls that require less attention focus is reasonable.
I think you are doing a strawman here. Nobody but you is talking about "mandates", and then you go ridiculing imaginary mandates that nobody is defending.
Case: seat belts. First introduced in 1949, three-point seat belt invented in 1955, Saab made them standard in all their cars in 1958, Volvo in 1959 after being shown studies with fatalities. The first compulsory seat belt law was in 1970 (Victoria, Australia), and only began in the US in the 1980's (with great opposition).
Case: ABS. Patented anti-locks in 1930-ish, the modern ABS in 1971, the system was slowly introduced first in high-end models, soon in every model. The US only mandates ABS in cars since 2012, Europe since 2004 (for new cars). Read: all cars were already being sold with ABS in those dates, except for the cheaper and shittiest ones.
Case: Airbags. I skip the history there, because airbags are still not mandated anywhere. They are subject to some regulations, but you can technically build and sell a car without a single airbag in it.
My conclusion: we should not wait or even hope mandates do anything. In the car market we should do our own research and trust (to a point) car brand safety records and voluntary tests like NCAP, IIHS or NHTSA. If a brand doesn't give a shit about safety unless under a government mandate, don't buy that brand, because they are decades behind safety standards.
Mandates are not the bare minimum in safety, they are well below that. Take for example one of the lowest scores in the current NCAP: Lancia Ypsilon 2015, two stars. Still, they have (not mandated): two front airbags, two side head airbag, belt pretensioner, belt load limiter, belt reminder and ESC. Fear no more, even if we find today that kids in the back raises the death rate in a collision by 20%, we won't see it mandated until 2080 if ever, way after car makers figure out a solution by themselves.
Your first link doesn't prove nothing, it has nothing to do with airbags being mandatory. According to this: https://autoily.com/when-did-airbags-become-mandatory/ , they are only mandatory in the US (my fault, sorry). Some countries, like India, are requiring ONE front airbag since 2019. The core of my message stands: car makers go way ahead the mandates. I don't recall any safety technology that ever banned or delayed a car model from the market, unlike for example emission regulations, that are announced with a deadline in a "by 2030 no car can emit more than X CO2 g/km, so you better comply or be banned" fashion. In Europe that kind of regulation is causing diesel cars to vanish from the market. Safety regulations are always after the fact: "it seems than 100% of the new cars already have seat belts. Lets make it mandatory", and are usually announced with "the UE would like all cars to have anti-collision alert mechanisms before 2025", signaling that maybe in 2030 they make it mandatory for the remaining 20% that still don't have it today.
About the NCAP, I don't understand your message. Maybe you understood that brands send their cars to NCAP voluntarely? What I meant was that NCAP is a voluntary non-profit organization, and they can't do much even if your car is a cofin with wheels other than giving it zero stars. It's not like they can ban your car from the market under safety motives, like a government could do if they want.
What happens with these non-mandatory programmes is that a manufacturer can give the programme money to buy their standard equipment vehicle and then the programme will buy the appropriate car from a dealer. The vast majority of vehicles are purchased this way.
This way they can't manipulate the vehicles being tested. The easiest way for your new 4954 model to get excellent NCAP scores is to make the actual 4954's people can buy from a dealer all good enough for excellent NCAP scores, the NCAP will just buy one and test it and it should score well because it's a 4954.
If only there was some way to move cars from one place to another :D
A fellow passenger on a train one day was in that line of work. Customer dispatches him to pick up a car, he gets a train to the nearest station, gets a taxi to the car, picks the car up, drives it to the desired destination, another taxi and another train ride. Pay is reasonable if you like driving and can fill your time on a train (e.g. you like to read or listen to stuff, not great if you're an outdoors person or you need to be at home looking after the kids). Obviously most customers are moving valuable cars they can't get to, classics, high end luxury or sports cars where there might only be two dealers in the country, that sort of thing, but he doesn't care if you want him to drive a mid-market hatchback bought new off the lot yesterday afternoon, pay is the same.
You need to draw a line, otherwise really anything in your car can be safety-critical, you just need to imagine the right circumstances.
I would draw the line at the controls that are mandated by law. Every control mandated by law should not only be mandated to exist, but also be mandated to exist as a physical, easily reachable button.
> Every control that will be used by the driver for any purpose whilst the vehicle is in motion is safety critical.
Okay, that's at least limiting it somewhat. However, what about the setting for Bluetooth connectivity of the radio? It technically can be used while driving, and there's probably a non-zero count of people who have already used such a setting while driving to pair their phone or whatever. What about the time/date setting of the clock in your car? Same thing. Physical buttons for all of that?