The US government finally realizes that cars kill people outside the vehicle, too

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The New Car Assessment Program, also known as the five-star safety rating, is getting a major update. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration announced a set of new proposals for the federal program.

Automatic emergency braking, blind-spot detection, and lane-keep assistance are features that NHTSA will consider for the first time. The ADAS features could become essential criteria for a five-star safety rating from the government.

Traditionally, NHTSA assigns safety ratings to new cars and trucks by putting a couple of crash test dummies inside the vehicle and ramming it into a wall at high speed. The system only assesses the risks posed to automobile occupants and not the danger posed to vulnerable road users.

NHTSA acknowledges that this is no longer a tenable system.

The European Union has a better version of the NCAP. If a vehicle can demonstrate an ability to come to a complete halt before colliding with a pedestrian or cyclist, it will get a five-star review. Under President Obama, NHTSA began the process of revising NCAP to address the safety of those outside the vehicle, but under President Trump, that effort was abandoned.

The Bipartisan Infrastructure Plan was signed into law last year. In addition to requiring passenger cars to include forward-collision warnings, automatic emergency braking, and lane-keep assistance, it also directed the Department of Transportation to revise NCAP to include those features in its safety rating criteria.

The goal is to rate new technologies that can stop risky driving before it happens. Vehicles that don't include these features are likely to receive a lower rating in NCAP tests. David Zipper, a visiting fellow at Harvard's Kennedy School and a vocal advocate for automobile safety, wrote about it last year.

From the outset, NCAP has been a consumer education program intended to help Americans understand the relative safety of new automobiles before making a purchase. Automakers can ignore NCAP if they choose, but federal law requires that its ratings be placed on vehicle window stickers at auto dealerships... Automakers eagerly seek top five-star NCAP ratings, and they boast when they get them.

NHTSA's new proposals may not go far enough. The agency states that it will perform tests to determine whether to include automatic emergency braking for cyclists.

There has been a tragic rise in the number of traffic deaths. More people were killed in 2020 than in any other year since 2007, even though fewer Americans were on the road. The year is shaping up to be a record year, with over 30,000 people dying in the first nine months. The final three months of the year are still being collected by the NHTSA.

It has been a bloody couple of years for pedestrians and cyclists. The number of bicyclist deaths increased in 2020. The number of deaths in cities rose almost 9 percent.

There is a crisis on America's roads, where 3,000 people die every month, and the numbers have only gotten worse in recent years, according to US Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.

There is a correlation between vehicle design and deaths. SUVs and pickup trucks are the most dangerous types of vehicles. According to a report released a few years ago by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, the number of pedestrians killed by SUVs has increased by 81 percent in the last decade.

SUVs are designed so that pedestrians are more likely to suffer fatal blows to the head and torso. The higher the clearances, the more likely victims are to get trapped underneath a speeding SUV.

The NCAP could penalize vehicles that are designed in this manner. If NHTSA sticks to its guns and adopts these proposals, that could have a huge impact on current SUV and truck design.