We automotive journalists generally have a one-dimensional view of "performance."
We typically use the term to refer to vehicle speed and handling. Cars that go fast and do it without swerving, swaying, skidding or otherwise losing their grip on the road are deemed "performers."
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We like going fast, especially on racetracks. We like taking cars to their limits, or at least imagining that we are capable of doing so. We don't like crashes. They ruin the fun.
But crashes ruin real-world life and driving every day.
As a result, according to auto industry regulators and executives worldwide, new criteria for vehicle performance must include a car's or truck's ability to protect its occupants in a crash. Moreover, the vehicle must prove itself compatible in the most incompatible of accidents -- one in which it strikes an unprotected pedestrian. Finally, "performance" must also measure a vehicle's ability to avoid hitting anything or anyone in the first place.
Those are tough standards. But they are made necessary by the growing carnage and mayhem on the world's roads.
The global statistics on vehicle crashes are alarming.
For example, one 2002 estimate, the latest from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's General Estimates System, put the number of vehicle crashes in the United States at 6.57 million, up from 6.32 million a year earlier. Even at 18,000 a day, those are limited counts, based only on police-reported crashes that resulted in substantial property damage, serious injury or death.
Estimates by groups such as the National Safety Council and other nonprofit, non-government safety-monitoring agencies say there are about 16 million vehicle crashes in the country every year -- or almost 44,000 a day.
All government and non-government agencies involved in tallying those collisions say that their collective price tag is astronomical -- in 2000, about $231 billion to cover the costs of the year's estimated 42,000 traffic fatalities, 5.3 million non-fatal injuries and 28 million damaged vehicles, according to a national vehicle crash-cost assessment published in 2002 by the U.S. Department of Transportation.
