UNAWARENESS OF SOCIETY
IGNORANCE is the most important evil in all fields of human life. Particularly in this shameful subject, we can list a series of ignored and disregarded facts, as below:
- Many people attributes sudden deaths, particularly in accidents, as fate or God wishes, ignoring that accidents do not happens, rather they are caused by different human mistakes , and could be avoided.
- Underride guards are passive safety devices, that must be made compulsory by law enforcement , since the cars and truck manufacturers were never able to implement them by themselves. These laws are always insufficient to provide the required protection for the occupants of smaller vehicles, by general incompetence of the responsible people, and by omission of the automotive industry.
- About 90 % of the accidents are due to human failure, and this figure will only increase if other reasons decrease. Due to this reason, ACTIVE AND PASSIVE SAFETY DEVICES must be scrupulously regulated and implemented by governments , and REQUESTED BY SOCIETY , since they are , in many circumstances, the only hope to save lives and reducing injuries gravity.
- OMISSION FROM THE MEDIA: Due to the general ignorance about potential benefits of reliable underride guards, typical accidents do not receive special comments from the media, that gives attention only to big and spectacular tragedies. In this way, the media contributes to hide the Government negligences, by reinforcing the idea that "drivers are crazy" and guilty by excellence.
- The word "DECAPITATION" is never mentioned...More attention is devoted to endangered animal specimens than to avoidable decapitations of human beings. The so proclaimed "inestimable value of one human life" has become just a fallacy...
- Another very striking consequence of this general ignorance is the passive role of the Insurance Sector, the one that is really loosing money
- Due to all the above mentioned reasons, there was never put a pressure on the vehicles manufacturers to solve the problem. Therefore the most knowledgeable technical people were never involved to study the technical problem in depth, as required.
- Worse than all, due to lack of interest and imagination, they are unable to face the fact that there is a basic conflict of interests between truck owners who want rear underride guards as high as possible from the ground, and the car passengers that requires a height equal to the car front bumper. As a rigid guard can not fulfill both requirements, they adopt a compromised solution, that is, they demand to install the guard at 55 or 56 centimeters from the ground, and up to 40 cm from the end of the overhang tray. This half safety kills just because half safety does not exist ! To complete the design of the fraud of guard, the strength is much LESS than necessary, mainly at the extremes of the horizontal member.
Here we face another shameful paradox: mankind was successful in going to the MOON and coming back, and was not able to design effective simple underride guards.