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.”]
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novel while looking out at a moored yacht and think “Mo Yar” would be a good name for a sailboat maker (see 
