Stars on Cars to Spotlight Safety

Safety sells cars—and when an automaker achieves a five stars rating on the government crash test, that achievement is spotlighted in their advertising. But what about the cars that don't have high ratings? Where does the consumer, especially the internet-challenged consumer, find that information? Sen. Mike DeWine wants that safety information to be on the window sticker of every new vehicle. To make that happen he attached an amendment to the massive highway bill that recently passed both the House and Senate. The catchy title for the bill is "Stars on Cars," but the senator is serious about putting safety information in the face of every new car buyer.

Star Value
DeWine said on the floor of the Senate that much of the information on the showroom sticker is mandated by the government—city and highway mileage, MSRP, etc. But how that vehicle performed in federal crash tests is not on the sticker. "The federal government knows information about that car," DeWine said. "In fact, the federal government has put that information up on the Internet. Yet, when you go in to buy that car, that information is not available to you. It is not available to the American consumer in the one place where it would make a difference—where you buy the car. The funny thing is, you have already paid to have the federal government spend millions of dollars to test that very car."


Under DeWine's bill, every showroom sticker would carry the five-star rating system of the New Car Assessment Program (NCAP) testing for a 35-mph frontal crash test, an offset side-impact test, and a rollover resistance test. The results are now published on NHTSA's web site, www.safercar.gov. Five stars is the best rating and one star is the worst. "The consumer ought to know what the government does," DeWine said. "Most consumers care about safety. They will make better choices and, in all likelihood, they are going to choose safer vehicles and more lives will, in fact, be saved. It just makes good common sense to do this."


In the same week the Government Accounting Office released a report calling for improvement in the government crash tests, since many vehicles were achieving four or five star ratings.


In addition to crash ratings on showroom stickers, DeWine's bill also calls for government testing of what happens inside a vehicle when it rolls over. The legislation provides for child and adult dummies to register injury levels when a vehicle rolls and to devise a means to study the integrity of the roof and passenger area during a rollover.