Could Older Cars Ever Be Banned On Safety Grounds?

While watching the ugly crash test comparison video we reported on earlier this week, we had a realisation. From a conservative point of view, the 20-year-old Rover 100 wasn’t just less safe than the Honda Jazz it was compared to; it was actually unsafe.

A car of any age can be made unsafe with any number of tyre-related fails, general lack of maintenance or taking short-cuts during repairs. Even so, none of us had considered the cars of two decades ago to be fundamentally unsafe. After all, the 1990s is an era full of cars we’d like to have babies with. But for the first time the authorities have a 20-year frame of reference on film to identify just how weak old cars are compared to new ones. Some will be better than others (Volvo, we’re looking at you), but most will be poor by 2017 standards.

It’s one thing to use the argument of: ‘well I just won’t crash’ before it happens, but looking at that Rover crumple; at the steering wheel clouting the ‘driver’ in the head as it shoots out and upwards… you’re not walking away from a crash like that. And you can never guarantee you won’t have one; there are too many variables on the road.

Still, it remains our free choice to drive an old car if we want to, and many of us do. We’re adults, and it’s our risk to take. Right? Well, there are people out there who disagree. Road safety charity Brake is a deeply serious group that believes everyone caught doing 31mph in a 30 zone should be banned for life and sentenced to 48 hours on a selection of medieval torture devices.

They’re not the only ones in the UK trying to minimise road accidents and fatalities. There’s the Road Safety Foundation, RoadPeace, the beard-wearers at GEM Motoring Assist and the wheel-shufflers of the Institute of Advanced Motorists (who are actually very good, if a bit dry). That’s just a few examples before we even get to the government’s own ever-present Think! campaigns.

Watching that video, we started wondering how long it’s going to be before just one expert, somewhere, calls for a ban cars over a certain age, or at least those that didn’t hit their maximum targets in the Euro NCAP tests. Once an expert says it’s a good idea, naturally the safety charities will follow, and then the momentum starts building. Out of the blue a law banning pre-1990 or even pre-2000 cars could smack us right across the face. For safety’s sake, we’d be told. For your own good, they’d add. Think of your family.

It’s not as unlikely as you’d think (or hope). All it would take is for someone in the Global NCAP system, or at Thatcham, to write a paper on how many lives could theoretically be saved if all old cars were banned. That sort of thing happens all the time with crash statistics for motorbikes or inner-city roads, for example, so it’s literally no stretch at all of the imagination to picture a study into fatal or serious accidents in cars built before a set date.

There can be two main reasons why this hasn’t happened yet. Firstly, there has in the past been a natural, progressive decline in the numbers of cars that survive past 20 years old. You could reasonably expect that to continue. Unfortunately for that theory, the nineties were full of great cars that people want to keep on the road, both because they’re awesome fun, because they’re rare and in many cases because they’re worth something. I don’t see there being as big a decline in older car numbers as we’ve seen in the past.

The second possibility is that even the stiffest of road safety charities know that trying to get older cars banned would be a minefield of apoplectic owners, legal challenges and mandatory compensation running into millions of pounds, which, of course, would have to come from the government. So parliament isn’t likely to be too chuffed about the idea.

But the fact remains that we’re potentially a single academic paper away from having to fight this fight. Let’s hope it never happens.