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Undoubtedly, the law should be tougher on drinking drivers. Half of all the fatally injured drivers are listed by police as "H.B.D."—Had Been Drinking. Tranquilizers also play a role: doctors calculate that one pill equals one drink. The U.S. might be wise to emulate Sweden, where police routinely stop drivers and take suspected drinkers to the station house for blood tests; anyone with more than .05% alcohol in his blood stream (about one cocktail) is sentenced to as much as six months in jail. That is more than many a drunken driver in the U.S. gets for killing a child with his car.
The Two Collisions
Because laws, highways and the human personality are difficult to alter, Detroit is beginning to realize that it will have to try harder to improve the car itself. To what extent could new designs reduce fatalities? Safety engineers at Harvard, Cornell, some of the insurance companies and in the Government believe that it is possible to build a stylish and economical yet fairly fail-safe car that would cut highway casualties by half. Achieving that would require, among other things, more reliable brakes and sturdier tires, bigger mirrors, better window visibility, and other devices to help prevent the "first collision"—the crash between a car and another object. Much more important, the safety scientists have lately begun to emphasize the "second collision" that occurs eight-tenths of a second later—the crash between the passengers and the car's insides, or against outside objects if passengers are thrown from the car. While drivers are responsible for most accidents, safety engineers contend that Detroit's designs are largely responsible for injuries in the second collision. Now the goal is to alleviate that human damage by building stronger car bodies, smoother and better padded interiors, and superior harnesses for passengers.
In a collision, everything in the car flies forward at its original velocity, particularly the passengers. Like hammers striking nails, they ram into lethal little things: gearshift levers, air-conditioning ducts, ignition switches, chrome decorations on seats, glove compartments. One-fifth of the passenger fatalities result from being impaled by the steering wheel. The most dangerous place in the car is right next to the driver, the so-called death seat. Three-fifths of all passenger deaths are caused by striking the instrument panel, the roof, the windshield or its pillars, or being thrown from the car.
The most common driver's fault in auto mishaps is speed. High horsepower is not necessarily dangerous; it can be a lifesaver in passing another car. But there is little reason for anybody to top 80 m.p.h. Asks George Romney, who has become particularly safety conscious since leaving the American Motors presidency to become Governor of Michigan: "Has the auto industry not neglected safety for style and overemphasized speed and power? It makes drivers feel that they are at Daytona Beach and not on highways." G.M. markets a limited-production Chevelle Z-16 that revs up to 160 m.p.h.; Ford last month also brought out a Galaxie that races up to 160 m.p.h., and Detroit sold the first one to Astronaut Gordon Cooper.