Cars in Europe to Necessarily Have Electronic Stability Control

While India is still waiting for even airbags to be made mandatory, Europe has gone a step further to make its cars much safer to drive by making electronic stability control (ESC) a standard fitment in all new cars. In Europe it is estimated that since 1995 at least 1,88,500 crashes involving injury have been avoided and more than 6,100 lives saved by ESC, says Global NCAP.

Country and regions that have made the application of ESC mandatory are Australia, Canada, the European Union, Israel, Japan, the Republic of Korea, the Russian Federation, Turkey and the United States of America. In fact, government of Argentina and New Zealand too have committed to mandate this life-saving technology in 2018 and 2015 respectively.

At Global NCAP's Annual Meeting, which took place in Tianjin, China on October 30, held in parallel with the 2014 UN Decade of Action for Road Safety Summit, Global NCAP adopted the Tianjin Declaration. While applauding all the countries that have made ESC mandatory, the declaration asks all UN Member States, especially the ones producing automobiles, to mandate ESC in new models by 2018 and in all all models by 2020.

Global NCAP's secretary general David Ward said: "ESC is the most significant advance in vehicle safety since the introduction of the seatbelt. The anti-skid technology is already preventing hundreds of thousands of loss of control crashes and saving tens of thousands of lives, but will achieve even more if legislators around the world make ESC compulsory."