Don’t hold your breath waiting for your new car to have those cool crash avoidance features you see in commercials for high-end sedans.
A recent report by the Highway Loss Data Institute (HLDI) shows that it typically takes 30 years for a promising safety feature to migrate from top-end luxury cars to the rest of the vehicle fleet. “More precisely,” says a recent issue of Status Report, a newsletter published by HLDI and the insurance Institute for Highway Safety, “it will take at least that long before 95% of vehicles on the road could have a given feature.”
For example, the article says, 95% of all registered vehicles won’t have front airbags until 2016, even though manufacturers have been installing them in vehicles since the mid-1980s, and they have been required in most new passenger vehicles since 1999.
“New features that prove beneficial aren’t instantly available in all new models,” one of the report’s authors stated. “And once they are, not everyone rushes out to replace their old vehicle right away.”
