Why car companies might finally have to care about pedestrian safety

Earlier this month, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) unveiled a significant change to car regulations that delighted safety advocates, annoyed automakers, and surprised pretty much everyone.

In a first, NHTSA proposed forcing car companies to limit the risk of pedestrian head injuries in a collision. If the proposal becomes law, models whose front ends pose excessive danger to people walking—think hulking SUVs and pickups—could no longer be legally sold. That would represent a major step toward addressing the soaring number of U.S. pedestrian deaths, which hit a 40-year high in 2021.

Lest there be any doubt: This is a big deal. Despite the risks that oversized cars pose to pedestrians (as well as cyclists and those in smaller cars), NHTSA has until now refused to restrain the design of big models that produce the bulk of Detroit’s profits. Automakers, for their part, have insisted that emergent pedestrian detection technology will negate any danger from car bloat (a term I use to describe the ongoing expansion of automobiles).

With its new proposal, NHTSA has effectively rejected automakers’ position, arguing that even with automatic braking, constrains on car bloat are necessary to protect those on foot.

“You can have car safety technology, but that technology alone isn’t enough,” said Robin Hutcheson, a former U.S. Department of Transportation official who led the development of the department’s 2021 National Roadway Safety Strategy. Although NHTSA’s proposal is limited in its scope (it says nothing about oversized cars’ large blind zones or danger to pedestrians’ torsos), it could be an inflection point in American automobile oversight.

To appreciate the significance of NHTSA’s move, it helps to understand the history of federal car regulations. NHTSA’s roots go back to the 1960s, when a wave of outrage followed the publication of Ralph Nader’s jeremiad Unsafe at Any Speed (and General Motors’ ham-handed response that involved hiring private investigators to tail Nader).

Congress subsequently established NHTSA and created the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards (FMVSS), an encyclopedic list of requirements for new cars that touches on everything from brakes to steering wheels. FMVSS is the bible of American car regulations: If a new model adheres to all of its requirements, it can be legally sold within the U.S. If not, no dice.

The early focus for NHTSA and FMVSS was protecting drivers and passengers inside models like the 1960s Chevrolet Corvair, which Nader argued was prone to rollovers. That orientation endured for decades, as NHTSA updated FMVSS to require airbags and began producing car safety ratings derived from tests that involve slamming vehicles full of crash test dummies into various obstacles.

Viewed narrowly, NHTSA’s strategy might be called a success. According to data from the National Safety Council, deaths from car-on-car crashes declined 18% from 1972 to 2022 in the U.S. despite a growing population and vehicle fleet. But those numbers tell only part of the story.

Over the past 50 years, American automobiles have undergone a metamorphosis, with sedans and station wagons replaced by so-called “light trucks.” In 1977, just 23% of new car sales were SUVs or pickups; that share is now around 80%. Meanwhile, model refreshes steadily add pounds and inches: The 2023 F-150 is about 800 pounds heavier and several inches taller than the 1991 edition.

A growing body of research shows that huge SUVs and pickups are contributing to rising death rates among American pedestrians and cyclists, for a combination of reasons. Heavy vehicles convey more force in a crash and require added time to come to a halt. The height of large cars creates blind zones big enough to conceal nine children sitting in a row. Tall, flat, front ends can be particularly problematic because they tend to strike pedestrians’ heads and torsos instead of their legs. A study by Justin Tyndall, a University of Hawaii economist, found that capping hood height at 4.1 feet—half a foot lower than a Ford Super Duty F-250—would save more than 500 pedestrian lives annually. (The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety has also concluded that tall, flat front ends are deadly.)

Other wealthy countries, such as the European Union, revised their vehicle safety regulations years ago to address risks posed to people walking or biking (which may explain why controversial models like the Tesla Cybertruck, with its sharp edges and bullet-bouncing exterior, isn’t for sale in Europe). But in the U.S., NHTSA’s myopic focus on drivers and passengers left it ill-equipped to respond to the dangers of car bloat, particularly because, as a recent cover story in The Economist concluded, bigger vehicles do confer modest safety advantages to their occupants—just nowhere near enough to compensate for the harm inflicted on those walking, biking, and inside smaller cars.

Carmakers, for their part, have shown little interest in restraining car bloat, particularly since the profits they collect from SUVs and pickups dwarf those from smaller models. Rather than reconsider vehicle design, American automakers have responded to rising safety concerns by emphasizing pedestrian automatic emergency braking (PAEB) technology that can bring vehicles to a halt before striking a person on foot. NHTSA has likewise touted PAEB, incorporating it into FMVSS as well as the crash-test ratings program.

Pedestrian detection technology is certainly helpful, but the laws of physics hamper its effectiveness at speeds beyond 40 mph. Furthermore, the technology doesn’t always work: A recent study from George Mason robotics professor (and former NHTSA staffer) Missy Cummings tested various cars’ PAEB systems, concluding that they “were not consistent internally or with one another in pedestrian detection and response, and only sparingly sounded any warnings.”

Given the limitations of PAEB, an intuitive regulatory move would be to assume that some collisions between vehicles and so called “vulnerable road users” are inevitable, and to enact regulations to soften the blow. But that’s a step that the Department of Transportation, led by Secretary Pete Buttigieg, has seemed reluctant to take.

Although the department’s much-publicized National Roadway Safety Strategy acknowledged that “recent studies” found SUVs and pickups “cause more serious injuries than passenger cars when involved in collisions with pedestrians,” none of the actions proposed with the report addressed car bloat. In an interview with Fast Company last year, Buttigieg was asked point-blank how regulations could protect pedestrians from the dangers of large SUVs and trucks. Rather than answer directly, he called for “further research” (despite the studies already cited within the department’s NRSS).

So it came as a surprise in early September when NHTSA issued a proposal for a new Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard that would, for the first time, force automakers to limit the threat that their vehicles’ hoods pose to people walking. The new standard, titled “Pedestrian head protection,” focuses on head impacts, which the agency claims comprise 70% of pedestrian injuries. If adopted as proposed, it would require automakers to conduct tests in which the front of the vehicle is struck by “headforms” resembling the heads of an average male and a 6-year-old child, simulating an impact at 25 mph. (The car safety program of Australia and New Zealand created a video of pedestrian safety tests that are similar to those proposed by NHTSA.) The relative “give” of a car’s hood is particularly important; ideally, it would be soft enough to absorb some of the force of impact, but not so soft that the head strikes an immovable piece of the engine below. Models that flunk the test could not be sold to the public.

The new pedestrian crash standards build upon the protections of PAEB by softening the blow of crashes that technology doesn’t prevent. “If you can’t entirely avoid the crash, which is of course the first objective, then you want to make the effects of the crash much less intense than they would be without the rule,” said Ann Carlson, a law professor at UCLA who led NHTSA from 2022 until earlier this year.

NHTSA estimates that its proposed rule will save 67 pedestrian lives annually beyond the benefits from automatic braking (The agency notes that some cyclist deaths may also be avoided). Although NHTSA projects a compliance cost of only around $3 per vehicle, carmakers don’t seem overly enthusiastic. In a statement, the Alliance noted the growing prevalence of automatic crash avoidance technologies and said it was reviewing NHTSA’s proposed changes to mitigate head impacts.

NHTSA’s revisions to FMVSS are now subject to a 60-day public comment period. Skeptical responses from automakers seem likely—particularly from those whose current SUV and truck designs could fail the new test. “I think the pushback, if we’re going to see it, may be in the difficulty complying for larger vehicles,” said Carlson. “But of course, larger vehicles hit pedestrians with bigger force, and therefore we really need to worry about them.”

It remains to be seen what will happen happen after the comment period concludes. A lame duck Biden administration could finalize the rule, perhaps with tweaks drawn from public comments. If so, Congress could still intervene, since the Congressional Review Act grants legislators the right to reject “midnight rulemaking” enacted during the previous administration’s waning days.

If the new safety standard does become law, it would be a watershed moment, the first rule that forces automakers to adjust their vehicle designs to reduce harm to other street users in the event of a collision. It could also open the door for other safety requirements to protect those outside of vehicles, potentially by addressing blind zones, torso impacts, and cyclist crashes—all of which FMVSS currently ignores. “I think there is an opportunity for this to be the first of many,” said Hutcheson.

If so, American roadways could become a little less dangerous. That’s particularly true for pedestrians, the road users who most need protection from federal auto regulators but have historically received none at all.