Dodge vehicles carry aggressive names: Challenger. Charger. Ram. It’s perhaps no coincidence, says Law School professor Ian Ayres ’81, ’86JD, that on safety, Dodge has one of the most aggressive records in the industry. By “aggressive,” he means having the “propensity to kill or injure someone in another vehicle.”
When a Dodge crashes, people in the other vehicle are 2.2 times more likely to die than those in the Dodge, Ayres and law professor Amy Kapczynski ’03JD found in an analysis of US auto fatalities. In other words, Ayres says in an interview, “for every life inside the car that’s being saved, relative to the median, their cars are killing two people outside the car.” That’s the highest ratio of external to internal fatalities of any carmaker. (Ayres and Kapczynski calculated the ratios for their article “Innovation Sticks,” to be published in December in the University of Chicago Law Review.)
A spokesman for FCA, Dodge’s manufacturer, responds: “The company takes seriously its commitment to public safety and designs its vehicles accordingly. All vehicles produced by FCA US LLC meet or exceed applicable safety standards.”
Having a fleet that’s safer than average inside but more dangerous outside is “a fairly unusual trait” among auto companies, Ayres says, and it “raises interesting ethical questions, not just for Dodge and other laggard manufacturers but for consumers.” Academic literature on innovation “focuses almost exclusively on which type of carrot is the best” incentive, but “it occurred to us that you could have sticks”—financial penalties for low performers. (Other auto-related areas do: speed limits and fuel-efficiency standards, for example.) Fines for persistently high fatality averages would raise a new question for auto companies: “There are tons of other cars that are doing better than yours. Are there measures you could take to bring your fatality rate down?”
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