In India it seems that car manufactures has started taking road safety norms very seriously, in 2014 around 1.37 lakh people lost their lives in road accidents in India and due to these fatal road accidents 1.2 Million were killed in the last decade. India has deluge of untrained drivers, roads with full of potholes, poor law enforcement and the modern cars that fails in crash tests and still allowed to be part of Indian roads.
Last year, the German car maker Volkswagen made official that it will be offering airbags as standard equipment across its line-up in India and followed by Toyota. Now, Toyota Kirloskar motors have declared to make ABS (anti-lock braking system) as standard equipments across all its Vehicles in India from 2016-17. Toyota is all set to become first ever car manufacture in India which will be offering ABS on entire line-up.
Toyota is also planning to test locally produced cars with Humanoids which is known as THUMS (Total human model for safety) related to crash safety operations. The main purpose of testing cars with Humanoids is to know the real time impact of crash tests on human body and what kind of injuries or how impactful it can be to bones, internal organs.
Toyota will also look towards improving pedestrian safety norms and are likely to be implemented in India by the end of this decade.
All the carmakers offer various equipments and goodies like touchscreen music system, leather upholstery, navigation etc but compromise with ABS and airbags which doesn’t cost much as compared to other mentioned features. So this is a good move by Toyota which not only makes their cars safer but will also give extra edge over the competitors.
Mr. N Raja, Director and Senior Vice President for Sales and Marketing at Toyota Kirloskar didn’t declare any specific date. He said “The new safety regulations are likely to be enforced by 2017 and further norms toward pedestrian safety are also likely to be implemented by the end of the decade. Our current initiative will not only offer a safer car to our buyers but also give us an edge against the competition.”
