Is Electronic Stability Control Worth It?
Posted July 28, 2008 by Mister Knowitall
I write in and ask myself: I was thinking about buying a 2009 Mazda 5 later this year. The Mazda 5 gets 27 mpg highway and is small and nimble, but it has no electronic stability control (ESC), which they call “dynamic stability control.” With recent studies stating stability control saves lives, I’m not sure if I should get it. Is the concern over stability control overblown or is it going to be worth the extra money to buy a more expensive, less fuel-efficient minivan?
The question you’re asking really breaks down to: how much extra will this cost and will I really ever need it? And those are good questions. First let’s look at “will I ever need it?”
In a 2006 report, the Insurance Institute of Highway Safety released a report on stability control stating that electronic stability control (ESC) could reduce the risk of a fatal crash for vehicle occupants by 43%. They don’t give any insight into how they computed these statistics, and the associated supporting documents are just repeats of the numbers in the release.
Despite ESC being available since the mid 90s and adoption rates increasing every year, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s numbers show that traffic fatalities among automobile passengers hit a 9-year high in 2002. The 2004 numbers were down just 2.4% from 2002 and were still higher than 2001, despite 3 more years of people raising the number of cars with ESC on the road.
But let’s say we take their numbers as gospel. If 25% of the cars had ESC, and getting ESC on all cars would drop the numbers by another 10,000, we can assume that the passenger death numbers in 2004, if no cars had ESC, would have been around 36,600 deaths. Given a population of 294 million in 2004, your odds of death in a vehicle without ESC were:
- 0.0124%
- 12.4 1,000ths of 1%
- 1 in 8,064
Given a 43% reduction in your risk of death, it goes down to:
- 0.007068%
- 7.068 1,000ths of 1%
- 1 in 14,148
Another way of looking at it is that they claim it will save 10,000 lives a year. In a population of 300,000,000, that puts your odds of being in the group of people whose lives were saved by Electronic Stability Control at 1 in 30,000 in any given year. If you’re not in that 1 in 30,000 group, either you weren’t in an accident at all, you weren’t in a potentially fatal accident, or you were in a fatal accident, but you were one of the 20,000+ people who would still die anyway, Electronic Stability Control or not.
Now they did say that damage was lowered in other non-fatal crashes as well. Your odds of being injured in an accident were around 0.918% or 9.18 10ths of 1%, or 1 in 109 (2.7 million injuries out of 294 million population).
Now, when all things are equal and you’re merely considering the cost of ESC as an option at $300-500 it’s probably a no brainer. Even though your chances of getting into any accident are less than 1 in 100 per year and each passenger’s odds of death are 1 in 8,064 if you don’t have it, when you factor in that it’s only going to bump up your car payment by $5-10 a month to have a 43% better chance of surviving what might otherwise be a fatal accident, who can resist?
The question here is whether you should buy another make/model entirely with lower gas mileage and a higher sticker price just so you can get stability control?
Let’s compare a 2009 Mazda 5 with automatic transmission, an estimated purchase price (based on “TMV” at edmunds.com) of $19,658, and 21/27 city/highway mileage against a Toyota Sienna with an estimated purchase price of $23,299, 17/23 gas mileage, and both stability control and traction control standard.
If we estimate combined mileage on a 70/30 highway-to-city ratio, we come up with combined mileage figures of 25.2 for the Mazda and 21.2 for the Sienna. Using the monthly mileage difference calculator from Rough Equivalents.com, with 12,000 miles a year and a gas price of $4.09 (what it is today at the local ARCO), the Sienna will cost you an extra $30.62 per month in gas.
On purchase price, we’ll go with an even $4,000 difference between the vehicles to factor in extra taxes on the purchase. If you’re on a 60 month contract at 7 percent, the difference in your car payment is $79.20.
So, at current gas prices, since we like nice whole numbers, the price difference between a Toyota Sienna and a Mazda 5 would be $110 a month or $1320 a year.
So, though your odds in any given year of getting in a fatal accident without stability control are 1 in 8,064, you’ll pay $1,320 a year to lower those odds to 1 in 14,148. And while your odds of getting into an injury accident are 1 in 109, you’ll pay $1,320 a year to make that accident less severe if it ever happens.
The odds of you getting into a potentially fatal accident or one that sends you or a passenger to the hospital are pretty long. And that $1,320 a year isn’t a guarantee you won’t die or get hurt. It’s just improving your odds. The question you have to answer is if those odds are worth betting $1,320 a year.
