Europeans increase safety tech take-up but Ireland lags behind

European car buyers are becoming ever more safety-conscious and are prepared to put down hard cash to underline that fact. According to a new customer research study from Frost & Sullivan – Strategic Insight into Voice of European Consumers on Passenger Car Safety Systems – car buyers across the continent rank safety as second only to reliability when buying a new car.

Fifteen per cent say they are prepared to pay extra to get such systems as rear-view parking cameras, blind-spot warning or forward collision alerts.

Close to 12 per cent of consumers expect original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) to fit their vehicles with systems that provide audible, visual and haptic warnings of impending danger, while nearly 40 per cent of consumers are willing to adopt a semi- or highly automated system that controls the vehicle in times of emergency yet allows for a driver override.

EuroNCAP ratings

While all of this is happening, there seems to be a falling back in reliance on the rankings of crash test experts EuroNCAP – consumers seem to be jaded by the fact that most cars receive a full five-star rating, and it’s a rare and pretty much unsellable car that gets anything less than four stars.

“To enhance interest in automatic emergency braking and other safety systems, market participants need to implement appropriate pricing strategies as consumers give importance to value for money,” pointed out Frost & Sullivan automotive and transportation programme manager Prana Natarajan. “For instance, market participants could consider adopting the product bundle pricing strategy to lower prices for customers and maximise profits generated from passenger car safety system installations.”

Vehicle registration tax

That's a comment that rings especially true in Ireland, where the high cost of options, including safety options, has been inflated by the levying of vehicle registration tax (VRT) on each additional item. Previous calls for safety-specific systems to be exempted from VRT for the sake of improving vehicle safety have fallen on stony ears at the Department of Finance.

Eddie Murphy, previous head of Ford in Ireland, pointed this out as one of his last official acts before he retired, saying: "Exempting optional new cutting-edge safety technologies such as active city stop and lane departure warning would certainly go a huge way to making these often life-saving technologies more popular. Once you add the full VRT rate to these optional items, they can become prohibitively expensive for some motorists."

Ford pointed out that only 0.2 per cent of its customers adopt such high-tech optional systems as a lane-keeping aid, while across Europe the average take-up is 4 per cent.

It’s a sad harking back to the days when anti-lock braking systems were still optional, and Irish buyers shunned them in favour of spending money on “visual” options such as sunroofs, air conditioning or an upgraded stereo.