It’s a great myth that auto makers, and most other manufacturers, are generally stingy on product safety design to save a few bucks. Yes, car safety features tend not to be effective at sales generation, as Graham’s article in The Liability Maze makes clear: “safety has historically been a minor consideration in consumer choices compared with more salient product attributes such as vehicle appearance, ride, performance, price, fuel economy, and maintenance record” (p. 123). But manufacturers are very concerned about potential publicity about alleged defects — whether real or imagined — that could have a dramatic impact on sales. Moreover, since the creation of NHTSA in 1966, car manufacturers have been subjected to rigorous regulatory review. Often — as with Ted’s seat back example in the following post — design choices necessarily involve choosing between features that are safer for certain types of crashes but more dangerous for others. And when manufacturers have resisted implementing safety-enhancing features, such as airbags, it has had little to do with cost and often a lot to do with liability: juries wouldn’t find a manufacturer liable for not including an airbag, but they certainly might for accidental airbag deployments that caused injury.

Even if it DOES include such design modifications, it definitely does NOT include safety features NOT added to due liability concerns (a well-documented problem).

Also, not all such changes (design by lawsuit) are a real gain… see the very next post for a good example of what I’m talking about. “Increasing liability” is NOT the same thing as “safer”.