The fatality rates due to car crashes in Brazil are almost quadruple that of the United States. The cause of death? Unsafe cars on dangerous roads and no one to enforce the rules according to a story in the New York Times.
At present, South American law does not require cars to have safety features such as frontal air bags and anti-lock braking systems, or any other advanced safety systems. These will only come into effect next year, even though they have been standard in industrial countries for years. Additionally, Brazilian regulators do not have their own crash-test facility, nor independent labs, so vehicle performance is dependent on the claims of the manufacturer.
The Latin New Car Assessment Program ran crash tests on the most popular car models in Brazil and found that the cheapest models of four out of five (General Motors, Volkswagen and Fiat) scored only one star out of five. The minimum accepted rating in the US and in Europe is four or five.
It was also found that these vehicles generally had weak, unstable body structures that provide little protection even in non-serious wrecks. Many Brazilian cars don't contain crumple zones to absorb impact during a crash and do not have as many reinforcing weld spots as the US and European versions.
Because the laws and customer demands on automotive safety standards are lax, manufacturers are getting away with producing sub-standard, unsafe cars to sell in the Brazilian market for greater profit. Cars are not spot-checked for safety standards as there is no 'conformity of production' clause in Brazilian legislation.
“The sad thing is, this has been the experience in the 1960s in the US, in the 1990s in Europe and now in Latin America,” David Ward, director general of the FIA Foundation for auto safety, told Associate Press in the New York Times.
“The industry does the least it can get away with until they're forced to do something different. It's maddening.”