Another year, another series of crash tests conducted in Europe prove that ‘Made in India' cars are unsafe for occupants. Instead of hiding behind inadequate rules or worse, nationalism, car-makers should step up to the plate and take action
It came as no surprise that every Indian car tested by the Global New Car Assessment Programme (Global NCAP) came back with zero star ratings. This third-party test is conducted using cars bought from regular showrooms in India, using regular base-model cars that anyone can walk in and buy. And like the last few years, several cars that were ‘Made In India’ failed the tests. Some like the Renault Kwid, a popular new hatchback, even failed structural tests with the front pillars failing under heavy loads.
Renault India officials stressed that they would correct these flaws, particularly since the organisation carrying out these tests called out the French manufacturer on its hypocrisy towards Indian car buyers. For Renault, safety is on top of the agenda for its European customers. Apparently, Renault has made structural changes to the Kwid now. Tests in previous years forced Toyota and Volkswagen to offer front airbags as standard equipment and even Maruti to offer a single front airbag on entry-level models, although not as standard equipment.
The test results caused a flurry of commentary on social media but the fact that they were announced the day before the exit poll results to the recently concluded State polls were aired also meant that their impact was lost on the larger audience. Several emails followed from the car manufacturers that stressed on a couple of points: First, all cars adhere to Indian norms and Global NCAP speeds are quite high; Second, all took safety seriously and this was evidenced by their high child safety scores.
As a long-time automotive writer and reviewer, this columnist has to call out the bunkum of the industry. The higher child safety scores — of two stars out of a possible five — was not so much due to the construction of the cars but more due to the fact that children were placed in standard child seats.
And this only proves that it is not just Indian car-makers who use the excuse of inadequate norms to sell unsafe cars, Indian car-users, particularly Indian parents for the most part actively put their children in harm’s way in motor vehicles. Car-makers actually have a point when they argue that Indians would not pay for safety because we are a bhagwan bharose country.
Indian children are particularly unsafe in cars because their parents really do not care about their safety — like the mother driving her infant around in her lap in a BMW 5-series in Delhi’s Greater Kailash the other day or the father letting his child jump around on the front seat of his Volvo hatchback at India Gate. Ergo, money does not seem to help people acquire a sense of safety for their children. These obviously wealthy ‘one-percenters’ are as oblivious to their children’s safety as those lower down the income chain, who send their kids to school in overcrowded Maruti vans with 12 to 14 children crammed like Sardines in a tin.
This is a disaster waiting to happen and given the knee-jerkism that exists in our polity, one fears that nothing will be done to promote child safety either on school vans or in cars until a tragic accident occurs. Even safer forms of school transport such as school buses do not, for the most part, have lap seat-belts.
But parents do not care about their children’s safety because their parents did not care about theirs and so on and so forth. The Global NCAP tests highlighted child occupant safety with a child seat in India, but such child seats of any sort are not mandatory in the country. Most cars, other than those that are exported to markets where such seats are mandatory, do not even have child-seat compliant ISOFIX fittings on their seat-belt harnesses. Other than a few Indians, particularly those who have studied or lived abroad, who have invested in child seats, it is rare to see such equipment in this country.
Worse still, in most countries younger children below a certain height or age are not allowed to sit in the front seat. This is usually a height of 135cm or 12 years of age, whichever they reach earlier. In India, indulgent parents actively put their children at risk allowing them to sit in the front seat. Not only is this dangerous in the case of a frontal impact, as the tests by Global NCAP have shown, in cars with airbags where a frontal impact would lead to a deployment, the child’s life is in danger. A rapidly deploying airbag could break a child’s neck or suffocate him or her.
A safety culture cannot be one that will grow in society, particularly one that does not care about the safety of its next generation. Therefore, and no matter how libertarian your views are, there has to be regulatory interference here where the Government has to actively regulate safety standards in vehicles.
We have allowed safety standards too much pendency — the automotive industry would not like crash tests at highway speeds; and according to lawyers working on the draft Bills, the industry has actively tried to discourage safety provisions.
We are building more powerful vehicles from motorcycles to trucks, yet have done little to segregate different traffic speeds. This is a country where the cliched image is that of a bullock cart and a Mercedes S-Class travelling side-by-side on a major carriageway. This has to change, and certain changes do not need legislative clearance, only some executive action is required. Uber and Ola, for example, could insist that all their passengers have to wear seat belts if they want to travel in their vehicles.
Tragic headlines have not been able to shake sense into the minds of even the rich Indian motoring class. The fact is that the Global NCAP has been conducting tests for three years and almost every year despite a few harsh headlines and pieces on news television coupled with columns like this one, everything is forgotten a few days down the line. This Government has taken some smart decisions over the past two years, and we hope it will take some sensible ones on road safety as well.
