Sicelo Fayo's Street Talk

What role should car manufacturers play in road safety?

WITH the festive season having come and gone, and all of us – or should I say most of us – having gone back to our daily toils, is it reasonable to assume that the tragedy of the road accidents in South Africa, which claimed hundreds of lives during this period, shall also soon be forgotten – well, at least until the next festive season?

That’s the way it’s been these last few years, and certainly there is no need to change the game now, is there?

That’s even though a number of questions have been left unanswered, or not asked at all about why this carnage occurs on our roads every year.

These have been question asked or should be asked because we, as South African society, can’t possibly be satisfied with claims by either government authorities or private sector spokesmen that the blame for the number of accidents on our roads during each festive season is solely due to bad behaviour by vehicle drivers, their passengers and/or pedestrians.

One of the questions to have been raised – and possibly for the first time ever – is that of the responsibility of the various motor manufacturers.

The question was: “Do vehicle manufacturers, in South Africa and elsewhere in the world, have a social and business responsibility to also play a more meaningful role in reducing and preventing the use of their products as murder weapons on our roads?”

To some it might sound a bizarre or even nonsensical question, given the documented amounts of time and billions of rands car producers have spent, and continue to spend, in vehicle safety technology.

As proof of their commitment to car utilisation safety, car producers would point to the mass production of vehicles with all kinds of safety gadgets such as anti-roll bars, body shells, side impact protection bars, ABS brake systems, improved lighting, airbags, a variety of electronic sensors monitoring every vital part of the car, etc.

They would point to this as fulfilling their responsibility to their products’ consumers and therefore to society in general, and that, beyond this, the rest of the responsibility should be on consumers to utilise the products in a proper manner.

But such an argument wouldn’t be sufficient to absolve car producers of their full responsibility to ensuring safety of society from their products.

The argument is premised on three factors, the first of which is that vehicle safety technology’s effectiveness is time constrained, and is conditional also to a variety of other factors, among which is maintenance costs.

The second reason is that the technology is product-focused rather than people-oriented and thus become fully useful and effective from a human endeavour only to the extent that people gain an understanding of its operation.

The third factor and which is possibly the most significant is that vehicle safety technology is secondary to a vehicle’s primary function – to move from point A to B – and thus susceptible to compromise.

The vulnerability to compromise vehicle safety technology can be seen in a variety of ways, one of which is the use of such technology by vehicle producers as a product marketing tool.

We all know and have come to accept that the higher up you go in the class range of vehicles offered, the better are the safety features of the vehicle, which literally means that – as we all know, again – the highest number of vehicles sold end up on our roads with only a fraction of the full safety technology available to car producers.

These factors, combined and considered with a variety of other issues, must have serious consequences, especially for low volume countries like South Africa, where the majority population have such a low income that they can barely afford even an entry level model.

Has time arrived that car safety be approached differently starting at the vehicle factories?

A point to ponder before the next festive season.

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