The federal government has been planning since the reign of King Bush II to require that automakers include a backup camera as standard equipment (to cut down on the roughly 17,000 people per year who are injured in “backover” accidents). I’m helping a friend who is shopping for a new car (she needs to move her two kids and maybe some extra children a few miles within a city so naturally her first choice is a pavement-melting SUV) and decided to check to see if all new 2014 cars would have backup cameras. This April 15, 2013 story says that the Obama Administration is still debating the rule.
Given the pace at which technology becomes cheaper and government workers become more expensive I’m wondering if now we are actually spending more as a society on arguing about these cameras than they would have cost to install. It seems that perhaps 30 percent of new cars won’t have the cameras in 2014.
If the camera and screen add $50 to the cost of making a car and the 2012 sales rate of 14.5 million is sustained, that is $217.5 million that would be spent on the backup cameras for those vehicles that lack them. The U.S. Department of Transportation budget was $79 billion in 2011 (Wikipedia) but it is tough to know how much of that was spent on making rules for backup cameras. Given that members of Congress are engaged in this debate and also journalists and members of the public, and that the debate has been ongoing for at least 10 years (George W. Bush signed the law (text of H.R. 1216, the Cameron Gulbransen Kids Transportation Safety Act of 2007) requiring cameras back in 2008, but presumably the law came out of a previous debate), it doesn’t seem inconceivable that $217.5 million has been spent arguing. Let’s not forget travel expenses for advocates of the law who flew to Washington, D.C. to try to get audiences with bureaucrats and members of Congress.
What do folks think? Will Americans spend more arguing about this hardware than the Chinese will charge us to build a year’s worth of the devices?
[Note that this is not an argument against the spirit of the 2007/2008 law. The automobile market is already so heavily regulated and, in some cases subsidized with federal tax dollars, that there is not really an obvious argument to be made against any additional regulation. As a parent I certainly don’t want any of my kids to be backed over because a car maker saw an opportunity to sell a $2000 option package and a consumer didn’t have the $2000 to spend on the package that included the camera. I think the cameras will pay for themselves over time, even if no lives were saved, because drivers won’t back over/into as much stuff (economic analyses of the law that I’ve seen concentrate on the cost of each life actually saved, but ignore the costs of property damage and injuries). I would, however, say that this does show a weakness in the American political system. Congress could write “There shall be a backup camera in every car starting in 2011, covering at least whatever a driver can’t see with the mirrors, and the screen will be at least 3″ diagonally.” Instead the law will say “This authorizes bureaucrats to engage in an endless debate, during every minute of which they draw fat salary and pension benefits at taxpayer expense, about the best way to regulate each and every detail of backup cameras. If they can’t conclude their debate by 2010 then they can pay themselves for an additional five or ten years to continue studying the issue and talking to their pals in the auto industry.”]
I’m not convinced these cameras improve safety overall. While they may decrease occurrences of backing over children in the blind spot, I believe they have the potential to cause more accidents. These cameras have terrible peripheral capability. You can’t be looking into the screen, requiring the driver to face forward to see what’s behind the car, as well as rearward, in the direction the car is moving. In my opinion, when driving, you need to be facing the direction of travel–that’s your primary area of responsibility. If you’re looking at a screen, you can’t see perpendicular each way if you’re about to back out in front of a car in a parking lot or on a street, because you’re fixated on the dashboard. Many drivers are already too lazy to look where they’re going when they back up and rely instead on the slivers of sight provided by their rear-view mirrors, if you’re lucky. Cameras and screens will make this worse.
The price point seems optimistic. Lower end vehicles would need to have new radios which integrate into the screen. Also, the makers now have to warranty these new, more complicated systems. Then, what about the lawsuits resulting from pulling in front of cars which weren’t visible in the rear-view display?
What I don’t understand about this debate, why is it necessary to have a video backup camera when a cheaper technology (the radar backup sensors with audible alerts) are more effective?
With the backup camera, your eyes need to be focused on the video screen when your head ought to be turned around looking not only to the back through the rear window but also through the side rear widows to look for cross traffic. With the radar backup sensors, they’ll warn the driver with audible beeps, beeping more rapidly when an object is closer to a vehicle. That way the driver can still have his/her head turned while backing up (as drivers are supposed to do) but still hear an alert when something unseen is hidden behind the vehicle.
I have these inexpensive radar sensors installed on my SUV and they work great, far better than video camera with a video display would.
The usual libertarian analysis on stuff like this includes the point that the instant you enshrine a safety technology in law you greatly retard the rate of progress in that technology. As long as these new things AREN’T required, several wonderful things happen: (a) high-end automakers experiment with expensive bleeding edge tech and can make back their investment by advertising their new twists on the new feature as much safer than competing cars. (b) cheap automakers find ways to copy the expensive stuff but make it cheaper. (c) People who really want the feature can find it – either built-in or as a third-party add-on. (d) People who are certain it’s not worth the money YET can buy cheaper cars without it. (e) If the new feature is BROKEN in some unanticipated way, only the “early adopters” are harmed – you haven’t inflicted the new feature on EVERYBODY. So there’s time to see what works and what doesn’t – there’s even a nice overlap period where some new cars have the feature and some very similar cars of the same year don’t, so you can do a real A/B comparison!
(a good example of concern (e) is how the earliest airbags had been calibrated to stop a typical adult male, which was sometimes sufficient to kill or decapitate women and kids. It was not exactly a great idea to mandate passenger-side airbags of that sort.)
Once a feature is standard, there’s very little incentive to improve it. It might well be worth prolonging the free competition period to get more improvement into the final product. (If the benefits are sufficiently clear it’ll probably end up in all the cars anyway within a decade or so.)
Only tangentially related, but I heard a talk by a Daimler-Chrystler engineer 3-4 years ago who mentioned automotive cameras and displays were dropping enough that it would soon be cost-effective to replace side mirrors with cameras. The initial price of the cameras and display would be more than offset by the gas savings in reduced drag after the conventional side mirrors were removed. Not sure if that included repair costs, or what mileage it takes to recoup the investment, however….
Glen Raphael –
I could buy the analysis you present in the case of powerful engines, pavement-melting brakes, spotted owl-leather sets and the like: ‘cool features’ that people think they understand. But there is not a consumer pressure for safety features, nor is there a way for consumers to objectively measure the safety of one feature versus another. That is why we have safety regulations and crash tests.
I’ll probably draw flak for saying that there’s no consumer pressure for safety features. But I’ll stick by that, because in general, the biggest thing people can do to improve their personal safety in an automobile is drive better, and that’s a rare behavior. If you’re not willing to do that, why take an interest in autonomous driving, crush zones, or air bag deployment profiles?
Incidentally, this unwillingness to improve one’s own driving is why we have laws outlawing talking and texting and drinking while driving, for example. I also do not see the market pressure towards correcting such behaviors.
There are some very good comments above.
I think the best use for back-up cameras is on vehicles that are used for towing. The cameras make hitching a trailer much easier. Phil is right that some auto makers are taking advantage of customers by bundling the cameras with infotainment systems. I passed on getting a back-up camera in a new truck a couple of years ago when I learned I would have to add a $2,400 infotainment system. Once the truck was equipped with the infotainment system, the camera was a $240 option.
I also have serious reservations about the safety claims of these cameras. While it is considered common knowledge that airbags save lives, there is a small body of research that suggest this common knowledge may in fact be wrong. One such study can be found here. http://www.franklin.uga.edu/news/articles/673/Airbags_increased_probability_of_death.html also http://www.iihs.org/externaldata/srdata/docs/sr4501.pdf We know that airbags can also cause injury and death, particularly to women and children, and vehicles for many years have incorporated switches to turn off passenger side bags. Another unanticipated consequence of increasing application of airbags is an alarming increase in the rate of vehicle safety recalls. http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2013/02/10/airbags-air-bags-honda-safety/1894353/ There is also the opportunity cost of legislated safety devices in automobiles. We don’t know what other technologies might have been developed with the resources that went into mandated airbags. I believe airbags have gotten a disproportionate share of credit for steadily decreasing highway death rates. Often lost in the noise about airbags are the improvements in tires, braking systems, stability control systems, headlights, structural materials, crush zones, and many others that have contributed to safety. Last year the Obama administration mandated that vehicles will achieve an average fuel economy of 54.5 mpg by 2025, a decision that apparently had little if any consideration for automobile safety. As a result of this legislation, automakers are looking at every possible means of meeting the targets, including stripping considerable mass from vehicles. Much of the weigh gain of vehicles in recent years is attributable to safety features including airbags and side impact structures. Governments also tend to favor pet philosophies and constituencies. For example, the current administration has heavily favored battery/electric technologies at the expense of others such as clean diesel. The past two administrations have subsidized ethanol as a motor fuel additive even though we know it can have negative consequences for health and the environment, not to mention putting upward pressure on global food prices.
I am not in favor of the NHTSA taking an ever more active role in mandating specific technologies for auto safety. GM developed the airbag without any incentive from the government. In the early year of the technology it was an expensive option and came to be considered “unfair” by our overlords in Washington. Now everyone has airbags whether you want them or not. It looks like cameras are the next thing to be made fair for all. I say let the free market decide what safety equipment provides the optimal cost benefit.
An analogy would be that technically-advanced aircraft have shown the same accident rates as the steam-gauged ones — the safety features seem to have been offset by people’s spending more time staring at the screens while they should be looking out of the window.