THE federal government should provide financial support to the car industry to make safer vehicles, according to a road safety expert.
Former MP and road safety committee chair, Barry Cohen, says that instead of giving millions of dollars to companies to create jobs, "let's give them the money to produce safer cars".
This would still create jobs but would also advance the technology needed to help save lives, he said on Thursday before the 2013 Australasian College of Road Safety (ACRS) conference in Adelaide.
Asked if producing safer cars was the answer for Adelaide's beleaguered Holden, Mr Cohen said it could be but noted he was not talking about employment but about saving lives.
Mr Cohen cited American auto safety activist Ralph Nader who said: "It is faster, cheaper and more enduring to build operationally safe and crash-worthy automobiles that will prevent death and injury" than a policy build around the impossible goal of the perfect driver.
"It is easier to redesign cars than to redesign human beings," Mr Cohen said.
ACRS president Lauchlan McIntosh said their target was to reduce by 40 per cent the current death rate of about 1400 a year and the numbers of seriously injured people, which was at least 30,000 annually.
"If we did that in Afghanistan it would be outrageous, and it is outrageous that we are doing it on the roads," he said.
He too called for safer cars, saying "let's make a design that won't make people die", noting this was done in the workplace and in aircraft.
Mr McIntosh says Australia should embrace new technologies such as devices which stopped drunk people driving.
"There is a lot of simple, easy things we can do such as more lane marking in rural and regional Australia ... and better protection of places where we have had a crash.
"How many times do you see two or three sets of flowers on the one post?"
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