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Car Advertisements Focus on Power and Speed
Safety groups decry marketing trend
By Greg Schneider, Washington Post
And a response by Eddie Wren, Executive Director, Drive and Stay Alive, Inc. (here)
August 5, 2004
(Please note this is not the full original article, as posted on MSNBC, but selected sections on which DSA wishes to comment.)
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The car in the TV commercial rockets around corners, soars like Evel Knievel and then rolls over about half a dozen times. It's extreme driving even by advertising standards, but what's really remarkable is the type of car being pitched: Volvo, long known as one of the safest, most responsible of brands.
Volvo's recent ads for its S40 sedan highlight what safety advocates say is an unprecedented shift toward speed and high performance in the auto industry and the glorification of those qualities in advertising. While complaints forced Nissan to kill an expensive commercial in 1990 because it showed a 300ZX outracing a jet plane, today's standards are far looser, from Cadillacs going so fast the paint peels off to Mercedes depicting its engines as terrifying, house-wrecking monsters.
The over-the-top images reflect the reality that new technology has made engines more efficient and cars lighter than ever, resulting in the highest performance capabilities ever offered to the public. Cars accelerate faster, reach higher speeds and handle in ways that weren't possible a generation ago. The average horsepower of new vehicles has more than doubled in the past 20 years, from 107 in 1984 to 227 this year, according to Edmunds.com
Safety advocates say the government has failed to keep up with the trend. The Governors Highway Safety Association, an alliance of state officials, says federal regulators ignore speed safety in favor of promoting seat belts and discouraging drunken driving. "We're at an all-time high for seat belt use, and fatalities continue to increase," association spokesman Jonathan Adkins said. "We feel that's because drivers are driving more aggressively, including speeding. Speed is a big problem and something we need some national leadership on."
There were 43,220 fatalities on American roadways last year, the highest number since 1990 and the second straight year of increasing deaths, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. The rate of deaths per miles traveled stayed unchanged, because Americans also drove more than ever.
As many as two-thirds of those deaths might be blamed on "aggressive driving" behavior, including speeding and improper passing, the federal safety agency found in a 2001 study. That behavior is influenced both by the amount of power offered by the auto industry and by the way carmakers promote performance through advertising, said Brian O'Neill, head of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety....
Certain automakers have always marketed high performance, but safety advocates say the fact that previously staid brands such as Toyota and Volvo are now pitching themselves as speed demons carries the trend to dangerous new lengths....
Last year, 16 percent of drivers on rural highways in New Mexico were traveling faster than 80 miles per hour, according to an institute study. Before 1993, the same study registered no percentage of drivers at that speed, and the number has gone up nearly every year since. In Maine, state police studied interstate traffic and found an average speed of 85 mph, the governors alliance said.
O'Neill lays part of the blame on advertising; another institute study found that performance is the dominant topic in automobile ads, with safety appearing in only 2 percent of the spots....
'A
squirt of horsepower'
O'Neill disagrees. "That is absolute and utter nonsense," he said. "Why is it then that performance cars and sports cars are the ones that have the most crashes and more insurance claims? . . . Those speeds and capabilities get you into trouble, they don't get you out of trouble."
The Governors Highway Safety Alliance has written to Runge and asked him to do something about the trend, and invited him to a forum later this year along with the insurance institute. Adkins said the alliance doesn't want Runge to ban advertising or place limits on carmakers, but that the group wants him to use his position to influence the industry to tone things down. The group also wants the Bush administration to fund efforts to step up speed enforcement, noting that many states have had to cut back on state troopers because of lack of money.
Runge is "adding speeding to the list of concerns, but setting speed limits and enforcement is the domain of state governments," NHTSA's Tyson said. "There are only a limited amount of things we can do from Washington. We can only work with the tools that are given to us." END Source: The Washington Post, via MSNBC (full article here, while available)
DSA Comments
Speed: As is sometimes the case, the USA has constitutional challenges with technology and methodology that is successfully being used elsewhere to combat identical problems. Speed cameras, for example, are in widespread use in some other countries and where used wisely have had a powerful result in the reduction of deaths and injuries at carefully selected dangerous locations.
The Influence of "Over the Top" Commercials: It is our belief that just as gratuitous violence on television and in movies, combined with the ready availability of guns in the USA, have helped shootings be so commonplace in this country, then the combination of fast cars with commercials that suggest extremes will inevitably lead some individuals into misguided behavior or even downright lunacy.
"Safety appears in only 2 percent of commercials": This is a sad state of affairs but at DSA we believe that it is entirely cultural and could be improved by addressing public perceptions more effectively, from childhood onwards. A lot of responsibility in this area -- whether we enjoy the entertaining results or not -- lies with television producers and Hollywood. On the parallel issue of seat belts, for example, how often have we all seen movies showing high speed car chases where nobody wears seat belts, the vehicles crash and even roll, and yet still people simply clamber out and walk away?
Death Rates: Yet again, only one criterion has been applied to indicate the seriousness of the death toll on America's roads -- "deaths by miles" (otherwise known as deaths by Vehicle Miles Traveled, or VMT for short). Here, the Washington Post stated: "The rate of deaths per miles traveled stayed unchanged, because Americans also drove more than ever." But this casually ignores two vital and highly relevant points. Firstly, even though many people claim or have been led to believe that the USA has safe roads by comparison with other countries, this is categorically not the case. In the latest tables showing the death rates in various countries, the USA lies in tenth position with a VMT rate of 9.4, which is 25% worse than Britain, which in turn leads the chart with a rate of 7.5. If the USA were to match the UK's VMT rate, approximately 8,734 American lives would be saved each year. Secondly, there is another, more widely used method of measuring -- the per capita rate -- which is simply the number of deaths for each 100,000 members of population, and in this context it can be seen that the USA fares even worse. Here, the leading country is Sweden, with a rate of 6.0 deaths. The USA languishes in 24th place out of the thirty relevant countries, with a rate of 14.9 -- 148 percent worse than Sweden, or 5 deaths here for every 2 deaths there. If the USA were to match Sweden's per capita rate, around 25,814 American lives would be saved each year. "America deservedly leads the world in so many ways, but sadly road safety is not one of them," says Eddie Wren.
"A Squirt of Horsepower": Toyota spokesman Mike Michels' claim that "There are plenty of times when a squirt of horsepower is real handy," [as a safety feature] is indeed flawed, as Brian O'Neill points out. On the other hand, to mildly contradict Mr. O'Neill, there are rare occasions when swift yet controlled use of the accelerator can assist safety. If a driver, as Mr. Michels suggests, needs to accelerate hard in the alleged name of safety on "plenty" occasions, then that driver would be displaying an intense inability to drive safely in the first place. Why? Because truly safe driving requires great concentration and constant planning ahead, plus timely and therefore gentle adjustments of speed and position to allow for changes in the route ahead and the actual or potential actions of other road users. This is why the many driving courses in the USA which are advertised as being "advanced driving," when all they do is teach skid correction and emergency avoidance techniques on a closed circuit, have absolutely nothing to do with proper advanced driving. With actual advanced driving, one avoids getting into a dangerous situation in the first place rather than trying desperately to escape from such a situation once it has actually started. Mr. Michels' suggestion therefore leans more towards the old saying that "any fool can drive fast enough to be dangerous" than it does towards truly safe driving. Having power available for those rare occasions when it genuinely would help safety is no bad thing, but the incredibly commonplace abuse of that power is precisely what Mr. O'Neill was referring to when he rightly asked: "Why is it then that performance cars and sports cars are the ones that have the most crashes and more insurance claims?"
Education: We would argue that the poor education of drivers -- including the stunningly low requirements for passing a driving test -- is a major factor, if not the over-riding factor in the current state of poor driver abilities and behavior, and grossly excessive casualty rates, in America. Getting a driver's license in the USA needs to gain a degree of difficulty which matches the seriousness and responsibility required to drive a vehicle without there being an undue degree of risk to oneself or to others.
Conclusion: If American people are going to continue to enjoy the right to buy whatever car they wish, no matter how powerful it may be, then we cannot rely on engineering alone to protect us from ourselves or from irresponsible drivers in other vehicles. Nor can we rely entirely upon the good efforts of law enforcement officers, no matter how assiduously they do their thankless work. There simply cannot ever be a sufficient number of officers to maintain blanket control. Road Safety is often defined as the "three e's," and the third one is education. But to get a major change in driver behavior in the USA would need an ongoing and relentless educational campaign for at least 25 years -- a generation -- or more. Things will not change significantly unless and until the entire public perception of driver responsibility alters quite radically, and bad driving truly becomes socially unacceptable. Sweden has set the benchmark in this arena, with its approach to drunk driving -- now seen in that nation as the act of a pariah -- and many countries are starting to follow suit not only in respect of drunk driving but also in respect of driver behavior. That is the way forward.
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