On Sun, 18 Sep 2005, Sylvain
That's true. Most of them aren't allowed into the US, because they don't comply with US safety standards. The logical buttumption is that they're unsafe, but real-world facts don't bear out that conclusion.
The US has slipped badly in the worldwide rank of highway safety, from first at the beginning of the 1970s to *sixteenth* and *tenth* today (per vehicle-KM travelled, and per vehicle registered). www.scienceservingsociety.com has good info and hard data on the matter.
A major part of the problem is that we are allowing doctors, lawyers and politicians to make our traffic safety regulations, rather than engineers. Doctors are useless for anything except a consultation role in developing crashworthiness standards (the crash has happened, now what happens to the humans inside the vehicle?). They are completely unqualified to make policy for crash avoidance (the safest crash is the one that DOESN'T HAPPEN) and other important aspects of highway safety. Lawyers are even less qualified in this area -- their specialties are making sure the agency doesn't get sued and setting up non-tariff trade barriers at the behest of the automakers in the form of different-but-not-better vehicle standards. The head of NHTSA is a trauma surgeon. Not an engineer.
It doesn't help that in addition to allowing unqualified people to make our safety laws, we also -- in typical US fashion -- stand atop our hill and pound our chest and crow about the US market having the world's safest cars, and laugh at the stupid rest of the world and their dumb little international ECE safety standards...
...which utterly fails to explain how the US manages to lag so badly in real-world safety performance.
