The modern car is becoming ever safer and more independent - and the classic car?
06/17/2018
In the fight against road accidents, the EU is pursuing an active policy to make cars safer and prevent errors at the wheel. As of 2021, a number of features are to be made mandatory for new cars or at least required for a good NCAP crash test score, including automatic emergency braking systems, lane departure warning systems, intelligent speed enforcement systems, reversing cameras/obstacle detection systems and the like. If you read the list of requirements for modern cars, you can see the trend towards autonomously driving cars and constant driver monitoring. With the next batch of measures, the EU wants to save around 10,500 lives per year, which would be a reduction in deaths in road accidents of over 40 percent.
As worthwhile as the accident prevention developments are, there are also critical questions from the perspective of classic and vintage car drivers. How welcome will old cars be in the near future if people classify them as less safe - also for other road users?
How will the increasingly widespread use of assistance systems affect drivers' abilities? Even today, few drivers are likely to be able to perform a proper stutter brake if there is no ABS on board.
How will insurance premiums develop if the accident risk of old cars increases measurably compared to the rest of the car population?
In any case, it looks as if we vintage and classic car drivers will have to fight for our place on the roads of the future.
