I can remember it clear as day, it was 1962 and we were driving up to Red Hook, NY to pick up our brand-new Chevy Biscayne station wagon. It was a shiny brown with two bench seats and space in the back. Perfect for our family of six. This was the chariot that would carry us to Lake George’s “Gaslight Village” and beyond.
Of course, the idea of car seats for the little kids was unheard of in the day. Even if they had been around what would you secure them with, since General Motors seemed to think seatbelts were an unnecessary extravagance. The popular wisdom of the day was it was safer to be thrown from the car than actually stay securely strapped to it if there should be an accident.
On our drives through the Catskills and up into the wildernesses of the Adirondacks we were lucky, we never had an accident and had to find out how unsafe a car without seatbelts and airbags was. There were almost 39,000 automobile deaths in 1962, in 2016 there were about 37,500 deaths[1]. What is lost in this simple comparison is the rate of fatality. Today’s rate of 1.18 deaths per 100 million miles driven is far better than the 5.08 rate of 1962. We are a lot safer in today’s cars than we were then. Good for us, but it does come at a cost.
If we took the 1962 cost of $2,832[2] and adjusted only for inflation the same vehicle would cost $23,000[3]. Obviously, you can’t get the same size vehicle today for that amount, but I think we can agree the cost of regulatory improvements is reasonable since they do save lives. If we did not make the safety improvements and the fatality rate stayed the same we would see almost 158,000 deaths a year with today’s population.
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