National Highway Traffic Safety Administration - Cost/benefit Requirements

Cost/benefit Requirements

There are nominally strict cost-benefit ratio requirements for every safety device, system, or design feature NHTSA mandates for installation on vehicles. That is, the device, system, or design feature may not be made mandatory unless it will save more money (in property damage, health care, etc.) than it costs, or must cost no more than a specified amount of money per life saved. Such requirements may be subject to manipulation of estimated costs and estimated benefits to justify or reject almost any standard; FMVSS #208 effectively mandates the installation of frontal airbags in all new vehicles in the United States, for it is written such that no other technology can meet the stipulated requirements. It has been argued that even using conservative cost figures and optimistic benefit figures, airbags' cost-benefit ratio so extreme that it may fall outside of the cost-benefit requirements for mandatory safety devices. These same cost-benefit requirements have been used as the basis for Lighting-related lags in American regulations; for example, virtually every country in the world has since at least the early 1970s required rear turn signals to emit amber light so they can immediately be discerned from adjacent red brake lamps. U.S. regulations still permit rear turn signals to emit red light on grounds of cost-effectiveness despite NHTSA research showing amber rear turn signals instead of red ones give a larger crash-avoidance benefit than the 3rd brake light.