Auto Safety and Your Insurance

When seatbelts became standard in vehicles, injuries from accidents dramatically decreased. Now auto industry experts feel there is another technology, electronic stability control or ESC, that will be able to impact drivers safety just as much.

ESC was first seen in Europe on the 1995 Mercedes-Benz S-Class. Soon after the U.S. auto market started adding ESC to their vehicles and now all vehicles will be required to have ESC starting in 2012.

The federal government has made this requirement because they have seen the profound safety benefits of ESC in a vehicle. The IIHS studies claim "ESC has been found to reduce fatal single-vehicle crash risk by 49 percent and fatal multiple-vehicle crash risk by 20 percent for cars and SUVs. Many single-vehicle crashes involve rolling over, and ESC effectiveness in preventing rollovers is even more dramatic. It reduces the risk of fatal single-vehicle rollovers by 75 percent for SUVs and by 72 percent for cars."

From an insurance point of view, less damage to a vehicle means less money needed to be paid out to repair vehicle damage. That becomes less of an insurance premium for the customer. So, a vehicle equipped with ESC will reduce one's insurance payment since unlike seatbelts, which keep one safer mostly after an accident, ESC helps reduce or even avoid accidents. No accident=no insurance claim. This makes your insurance agent happy!

How does the ESC technology work? Here is an overview of how ESC helps to prevent accidents:

• ESC is a computer system that monitors what the driver wants to do by the way the driver is steering the vehicle.
• The ESC system can detect a loss of control and can engage the brakes and change the engine power to work with the steering the driver is intending.
• The series of sensors that make the steering, engine speed, and brakes work together helps a driver keep a vehicle under control better which may help a driver avoid a roll over or other accident.
• Example of when ESC would be engaged: The car starts going in a different direction than the direction the driver is telling the vehicle to go with the steering wheel. This can happen on a wet road with no traction. The ESC system can use the brakes and engine throttle to correct the vehicle to get it to go in the intended path that the driver is trying to go so the driver can recover control over the vehicle.