Numlock Sunday: Aaron Gordon on useless car safety ratings

By Walt Hickey

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.

This week, I spoke to Aaron Gordon who wrote “The US Invented Life-Saving Car Safety Ratings. Now They’re Useless” for Motherboard. Here's what I wrote about it:

The United States’ New Car Assessment Program is how the federal government assesses the safety features of new vehicles, and since its introduction in America there are now eight NCAPs worldwide, in Australia, South Asia, China, Europe, Japan, Korea, and Latin America. The European NCAP estimates its program has saved over 78,000 lives. While the U.S. invented NCAPs, the program now lags the global tests, and the standards haven’t been upgraded in a decade. Out of 353 cars tested in the 2020 model year, 73 percent got a perfect five-star rating. But at the same time, the fatality rate has been getting worse: from 2010 to 2018, road fatalities in the U.S. rose 11 percent, while from 2010 to 2019 EU road fatalities decreased 23 percent. One reason is that while the European N…