by Max Mosley
In 1995, with our campaign beginning to take off, officials from the UK Department for Transport (DFT) and the Transport Research Laboratory (TRL) approached the FIA about the possibility of creating a New Car Assessment Programme (NCAP). The first NCAP had been founded by the US government in 1978 and gave consumers independent safety ratings of car models based on laboratory crash tests. The TRL’s Professor Adrian Hobbs had been given the go-ahead for a research project to crash-test some popular UK cars and hoped it could develop into a permanent NCAP.
We encouraged Adrian and his DFT officials to make it a European rather than solely UK programme. It would be easier for the FIA to support the project if it was more international in scope, and we thought that it would encourage some other governments and partners to join. Thus was born the European New Car Assessment Programme (Euro NCAP), for which I was asked to serve as chairman. As we anticipated, Euro NCAP quickly gained support from the governments of the UK, Sweden and the Netherlands, as well as FIA clubs and consumer organisations. At last, and after a great deal of investment, hard work and persuasion, the FIA was now playing a leading role in European road safety.
In addition to the legislation, we needed to get the European Commission on our side for this project. A number of commission experts agreed with us because they had been forced to dilute the original draft legislation by heavy car industry lobbying. They were now delighted with the tougher standards introduced by the parliament as a result of Alan Donnelly’s amendments. They liked the idea of an NCAP providing EU citizens with information on vehicle safety. Luc Werring, the head of the road safety unit in the commission’s Directorate General for Transport, played a key role by supporting an FIA-led application for a road safety grant for Euro NCAP.
Predictably, the Brussels-based ACEA tried to block this by lobbying officials in the Industry Directorate. This intervention initially delayed commission support, but Luc Werring resubmitted our grant proposal at a moment when his opposite number in the industry unit was absent and the grant was approved.
Euro NCAP’s first test results were released to the media at a launch in 1997 and gained huge publicity across Europe. The Rover 100 (originally the Mini Metro) performed particularly badly – its zero-star result sent sales through the floor and within six months Rover had decided to terminate production.
The industry reacted with fury. Britain’s Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders hired an ex-MP to try to rubbish Euro NCAP’s work. A very senior executive from Renault asked for a meeting at the next Grand Prix and told me they would pull out of Formula One if we continued. I invited him to go right ahead. Later, however, David and I met the then CEO of Renault, Louis Schweitzer, a former senior French government official, who had an entirely sympathetic view and saw the potential for Renault. He completely changed the company’s approach to passenger safety and Renault eventually produced the first ever five-star car, a level of passenger safety not thought possible in the mid-1990s. Even the new, tougher EU legislation was only a little better than the equivalent of one of Euro NCAP’s stars. Safety has been a major selling point for Renault ever since and other manufacturers have followed their lead. The conventional wisdom that ‘safety doesn’t sell’ has long since been discredited.
By 2011 nearly all passenger cars on the roads of the EU complied with the new 1998 crash-test standards. These regulations had created a mandatory minimum level of safety and Euro NCAP was by then providing an incentive to build cars that far exceed the legislative standards. This has transformed the safety of cars on the roads of Europe and many neighbouring countries. Five-star cars are now the norm rather than an exception.
Recognising this success, the European Commission described Euro NCAP as the most cost-effective EU road safety initiative of the previous 20 years.6 In the UK, the Department for Transport estimates that half the improvement in road safety in the last 15 years is the result of improved passenger car safety. Across the EU since 2000, road fatalities have dropped by just under 50 per cent, resulting in a reduction of over 100,000 in the number of road deaths that would have occurred had things continued with no change. As much as 40 per cent of this improvement is due to the combined effect of the 1998 EU crash-test standards and the creation of Euro NCAP.
As these figures began to emerge, I felt we had achieved something really worthwhile. All the meetings, travelling, early-morning starts and heated arguments seemed justified. This was a truly crucial triumph. You could achieve a certain amount in motor sport, but these figures were many orders of magnitude more significant. You never meet the people who are alive and uninjured as a direct result of all that effort, but you know they are out there and that is deeply satisfying.
In January 2006, the work we had all done on road safety in the previous 12 years was recognised by the French government. The French foreign minister held a reception for us at the Quai d’Orsay and awarded me the Légion d’honneur. He made a very kind speech recognising what we had done for road safety internationally. The European Commission invited me to join its CARS 21 High Level Group for the European car industry – many of the CEOs of the big car companies were also members and by now relations with the industry were friendly. I think behind the rhetoric many of them secretly agreed with much of what we had been doing to improve safety standards. No one could really be happy with thousands of avoidable deaths on European roads.
Less pressing but nevertheless important was the environment. There was a great deal of work to do in Brussels. We ran a campaign to reduce sulphur levels in fuel, essential for really low emissions because sulphur damages catalysers. We were opposed by a determined oil industry because reducing the amount of sulphur in fuel increases refining costs. They were much more united than the car industry but the zeitgeist was against them, particularly in northern Europe.
We also secured a legal requirement for catalysers to work in freezing conditions. That is why the unpleasant smell in urban areas on cold mornings has gone. The car industry was not pleased. One big manufacturer showed us the new cold rooms in their R&D centre and, only half-jokingly, told me, ‘This is all your fault!’ But in the end the extra cost was the same for everyone and the improvement in air quality on frosty days is palpable. In a similar way, the CEO of a major car company told me, again half-jokingly, that the irritating beeping in modern cars if the seatbelt is not fastened was my fault. This was partly true because the beeper is important for a good NCAP score. But if it persuades more people to fasten their belts it will save lives.
In 1995 we started a carbon sequestration project with Edinburgh University, with the objective of making Formula One carbon neutral. It was intended to be purely symbolic because the amount of carbon produced by Formula One was negligible in the real world. However, we wanted to draw attention to the CO2 problem that was already apparent, even then. But despite being able to say Grand Prix racing was now greener than athletics (because we were removing all Formula One’s CO2 from the atmosphere but no one was removing the CO2 produced by the exertions of athletes), it proved impossible to interest the media. In 2014, the IPCC took up the idea, suggesting that trees should be planted on a huge scale to avoid irreversible climate change. We had persevered and the project continues to this day, but even the most rational campaigns don’t work until their time comes. They need to resonate with the public. Euro NCAP might well have failed had we done it ten or 15 years earlier.
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GLOBAL ROAD SAFETY
Soon after the EU applied Alan and David’s front and side crash-test standards for which we had lobbied so hard, the United Nations adopted them as Regulations 94 and 95 respectively. This was very significant because the standards have gradually been adopted in an increasing number of countries (most recently India in January 2015), making them today the benchmark around the world. We don’t have figures for the number of lives this has saved and continues to save but we know it is very significant indeed.
Harmonisation reduces costs and he
lps consumers by making safer products more widely available, but promoting it is often a challenge, particularly as Europe and the US have a different approach to regulatory systems (type-approval versus self-certification). Even though the resulting standards do not differ much, they have never been fully harmonised. Nevertheless, in 1996 the EU and the US launched the Transatlantic Business Dialogue to try to encourage regulatory harmonisation. Automobile standards were included in the talks and the EU and US Department of Commerce held a major conference on the subject in Washington in April that year. Alan Donnelly was invited to participate in his role as the European Parliament’s rapporteur for the automobile industry and David Ward arranged for the FIA to host the conference dinner.
As the joint host of the dinner together with Martin Bangemann, the EU industry commissioner, I was able to give a speech in favour of harmonisation and propose a new approach to the UN’s automotive regulation system. We proposed that the relatively obscure UN working party in Geneva be reorganised as a World Forum for Motor Vehicle Harmonisation and, crucially, that it should have the specific goal of consumer protection and high safety and emission standards. This, I explained, would ‘result in less expensive cars and bring benefits to the ordinary motorist’. These suggestions were well received, not just by Bangemann but also by Ricardo Martinez, head of the US National Highway Safety Administration.
Following the Washington meeting, the EU and the US held further negotiations and the UN adopted a new regulatory agreement in 1998. This supplemented rather than replaced the existing 1958 agreement but, importantly, it now included the United States. As we had recommended, the name of the working party was changed and the new agreement included provisions for consumer protection and high safety standards. Since then, the 1998 agreement has produced a number of important global technical regulations for key safety issues, such as pedestrian protection and electronic stability control (the anti-skid technology), all very important progress not just from an FIA perspective but also from a human perspective, avoiding thousands of casualties in countries all over the world.
In 2004, after some ten years as chairman of the European New Car Assessment Programme, Euro NCAP, I stood down in favour of Claes Tingvall of the Swedish Road Administration. Claes is a world-renowned road safety expert and originator of the pioneering ‘Vision Zero’ road safety concept. His idea was that the target should be a world with no injuries at all on the roads. I was always much more comfortable with this than the more usual approach of saying we must halve the casualties. That seemed to me to imply that half the current number of deaths and injuries was acceptable – not a good message.
Despite standing down as chairman of Euro NCAP, I still had a role in vehicle crash-testing. With David Ward I became involved in the idea of bringing the different NCAPs around the world together, and we started a pilot Latin NCAP project in South America, testing popular cars in Argentina and Brazil. The results were shocking. The top-selling cars all performed very badly, with weak body shells that collapsed on impact and no airbags. It was zero stars all over again and 20 years behind the levels now seen in Europe thanks to the 1998 regulations and Euro NCAP.
The Latin NCAP pilot project led to the launch of Global NCAP in 2011, and I became its inaugural chairman. In 2012, it held its first annual meeting in Melaka, Malaysia, and attracted support from all the NCAPs active around the world. The meeting also featured the launch of another pilot programme for an ASEAN (Association of South-East Asian Nations) NCAP at a crash laboratory built on the edge of the rainforest. It was remarkable to witness an event that was so similar to and yet so different from the original launch of Euro NCAP at the UK’s Transport Research Laboratory back in 1997.
The Latin and ASEAN programmes made such remarkable progress that by 2014 both had been able to award five-star scores to some vehicles and make safer cars available more rapidly than Euro NCAP in the 1990s, far faster than would have been possible with legislation alone. It demonstrates the extraordinary power of consumer information to encourage the industry to build better cars. Also in 2014, Global NCAP launched its ‘Safer Cars for India’ project, testing several popular Indian models and exposing their defects. These startling results were reported throughout India, making an enormous impact, and we visited Delhi in November 2014 for meetings with the government to discuss the problems.
On the same trip we visited China for the Global NCAP annual meeting, where we were amazed by the CATARC test centre and greatly encouraged to hear talk of Vision Zero as a target for road safety in China. Meanwhile, in India the media coverage stimulated consumers to insist that cars should meet the UN crash-test standards and, in January 2015, the government announced the construction of an Indian test facility and the introduction of the UN regulations in 2017. Two decades after Alan Donnelly, David Ward and I first started work on car safety in Europe, it has gone global and shows no sign of diminishing.
Through the FIA Foundation, we were also able to back the International Road Assessment Programme, IRAP. This evaluates the safety of roads in much the same way as NCAP measures the safety of cars. The relationship is analogous to the way in which the FIA specifies measures for the safety of circuits as well as for the cars that race on them. IRAP has demonstrated that there is a very big difference in the casualty rate per kilometre between roads that have modern design elements and those that do not.
So great is the difference that IRAP is able to make an unanswerable business case for governments to accept the relatively modest cost of making roads safer because of the cash savings which result from fewer casualties. In the EU, the average cost to society for each life lost is generally reckoned to be €1 million, taking into account all the direct and indirect costs of removing an economically active person from society early in life. And that’s before you look at the human suffering which cannot be quantified in monetary terms. Many of IRAP’s requirements are simple and inexpensive – for example, putting the right road markings in the right places – yet have a very big impact on casualty rates. IRAP has been extraordinarily successful and is now active in over 70 countries worldwide. Its chairman, John Dawson, is one of the FIA Foundation’s trustees.
We were fully active in Brussels from 1994 until my mandate as FIA president ended in 2009. I continued to undertake all sorts of lobbying activities with David and sometimes Alan, and seemed to be in Brussels almost constantly. By contrast, I only went to two or three Formula One races each year. In 2000, Alan Donnelly left the European Parliament and I persuaded him to become the FIA’s permanent representative in the Formula One paddock. Just the person, I thought, to handle the politics. This he did consummately well.
In 2001, I was elected chairman of Brussels-based ERTICO (Intelligent Transport Systems Europe), which brings together car, electronics and telecommunications industries with representatives of (then) 14 EU governments, local authorities, police, IT companies, the car industry and infrastructure operators. Its purpose is to encourage the introduction of electronic and allied systems for better road safety and traffic management. My work there made me aware of the almost unlimited potential of electronics for car safety and the efficient control of traffic.
I am continually surprised by how long the authorities take to adopt new technologies. More than ten years later, cars that drive themselves are only appearing slowly. Advanced technologies for traffic management – for example, cars that ‘talk’ to each other – have not yet appeared at all, at least not for everyday use. The increase in road capacity that could come from cars being joined electronically does not seem to feature, and even the electronic accident avoidance measures that are now entirely proven are not being introduced as energetically as they should be.
Hoping for early adoption of some of these technologies for road safety, in 2003 I co-founded eSafety Forum with Erkki Liikanen, then EU commissioner for enterprise. Its purpose was to promote modern electronic technology for road safety. He completely understood the potential but, as
happens with the European Commission, his mandate came to an end in 2004 and he went back to Finland, where he became chairman of the board of the Bank of Finland and a member of the governing council of the European Central Bank, positions he has held ever since. Had he stayed on at the commission, we might have had some radical proposals for road safety and traffic management. Instead, in 2012 the EU got the Liikanen report on structural reforms of the EU banking sector. The financial crisis had shown how much this was needed but he was nevertheless a great loss to the cause of road safety.
Also in 2003 the European transport ministers (including those from what were then the enlargement countries) met in Verona for a conference on road safety. Among those present was Ms de Palacio, a vice-president of the European Commission and the commissioner in charge of the common transport policy. I found myself on the platform and in a position to say what I thought. So I criticised not just those who were present but politicians in general, saying they never worked seriously on road safety yet were always ready to turn the world upside down for terrorism that killed far fewer people.
I went on to point out that, terrible though the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York had been, the deaths were fewer than the numbers killed every month on the roads in the US at that time and only just equalled the approximately 3000 deaths recorded every single day on the roads worldwide. The problem, I said, was that the politicians seemed to have no imagination. If they had to be present a few times when the police have to visit a family to tell them one of their number has just been killed in a road accident, they might take road safety a little more seriously.