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ANCAP: Australian Road Toll Costs Taxpayers $27billion Annually

Australians driving around in unsafe “shockers” The Australian road toll costs the taxpayer $27billion per year, ANCAP CEO Nicholas Clarke has revealed to TMR. To put this in perspective, the cost is a similar amount to the total Au


Australians driving around in unsafe “shockers”

The Australian road toll costs the taxpayer $27billion per year, ANCAP CEO Nicholas Clarke has revealed to TMR.

To put this in perspective, the cost is a similar amount to the total Australian defence budget of $26.7billion. It is an astonishing cost and one that concentrates the minds of governments and regulators, both federal and state.

The testing regime of ANCAP, the Australasian New Car Assessment Program, assesses and measures the performance of the dynamic and passive safety features of new cars, and the protection they afford to occupants - in both crash avoidance and when crashed.

And, while crash-testing new cars in the name of safety is expensive - and a cost borne by car manufacturers - the effect of unsafe cars is far more expensive Mr Clarke said.

“It's extraordinary (the $27billion cost of the road toll), so every life we can save and every injury we can stop, apart from the obvious human trauma costs and the emotional strain of all that, saves real dollars.”

Every year, around 1200 people die on Australian roads, with an additional 32,000 injured. According to Mr Clarke, the blame for some of these deaths can be sheeted home to Australia's ageing national fleet. 

"We've got an average in the carpark of about ten years, we've still got millions of unsafe cars on the roads. All those cars we tested in the nineties to the early 2000s before we had five star ratings, they are shockers," Mr Clarke said.

“They are one, two and three stars by today's standards, and we still have people driving those vehicles. There's still a huge way to go to convince consumers that they need to get into safer cars."

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