More insane regulations coming our way?

Rumor has it the US will soon be requiring electronic stability control on all vehicles, both SUVs and cars, sold in the US. While I think these are generally good things to have, I would not mandate them.

When do they stop with these regulations? And why do they constantly go after the most complex technologies they can find instead of looking at the root cause of most accidents?

The government has yet to do anything about driver training and testing, so that people can drive for 80 years on a license and eyesight test. There are no Federal-level mandated periodic safety checks for automobiles. Headlight rules are woefully out of date and barely enforced, so that drivers can frequently be blinded by cars with powerful and mis-aimed headlights, or even by cars with regular headlights because of the obsolete light pattern (designed at a time of dimmer headlights). There don’t seem to be any rules at all about fog lights and ancillary lights. Even standard brake lights rob drivers of their night vision. Likewise, minivans and SUVs come standard with black glass so you can’t see through them as in the days of old - when conditions on the road were easier to predict because you could see much farther ahead. But all these things are too cheap and too easy to fix. No, we need technology.

We could also look at the things we know to be very dangerous - cell phones and badly designed navigation or sound systems. NHTSA could work with automakers and aftermarket stereo folk to make stereos easy to use without looking, and without thinking. The police could actually enforce the few cellphone laws. These things would not only greatly decrease direct accidents, but would cut down dramatically on road rage, thereby reducing “indirectly caused” accidents.

But no, we need electronic stability control. On every single car made. Camrys and Corollas, Calibers and Caravans.

If I didn’t know better, I’d say they were trying to give government a bad name. And probably they are. That’s been one of the key strategies of the anti-regulation politicos - well, the ones without morals, anyway. It’s better to keep on regulating, but to make the regulations as daft as possible, so people get angry at big government and decide it’s better to do without it, and to trust private industry. (Which we have tried before, and found ourselves with private armies shooting at women and children in the street for daring to picket; with drugs that killed people instead of curing them; with ads that were insanely false; and with banks that were far less trustworthy than mattresses.)

Either way, this is a rule that gets my ire up, and I’m hoping it doesn’t go through.