Concerns older cars are contributing to Tasmania's high road toll
Tasmania has one of the worst road safety records of any state in Australia with 300 people killed or seriously injured on average, each year. While speed and inattention are the leading causes of fatalities, there's another important factor at play.
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TVTranscript
00:00 Modern cars are not only getting smarter, new technology such as automated emergency
00:07 braking or driver distraction detection means they're also getting safer.
00:12 It will tell you eyes on the road, it's like your wife sitting in the passenger seat.
00:19 Other technology warns drivers if their car is drifting out of its lane or alerts you
00:24 if there are vehicles in your blind spot.
00:27 The newer cars have safety systems that are built in to assist in saving lives.
00:33 But Tasmania is home to the oldest cars in the nation.
00:37 The average age of the state's vehicle fleet is 13.3 years compared to the Australian average
00:44 of 10.6.
00:46 Roughly 82,000 vehicles are more than 18 years old.
00:51 The evidence and research tells us that newer cars are involved in far fewer fatal and serious
00:55 injury crashes than older vehicles.
00:58 A lot of people buying older vehicles are inexperienced drivers.
01:02 They're young, they don't have a lot of money, they buy a car they can afford and it obviously
01:07 doesn't have all the safety features that the newer cars have.
01:11 Tasmania has the worst road safety record of any state and the second highest death
01:17 rate after the Northern Territory.
01:20 Serious casualty crashes, so that's fatalities and serious injury crashes combined, is still
01:25 up a couple of percent on last year and it's still nearly 10 percent higher than the average
01:29 of the previous five years.
01:30 The Legislative Council's Road Safety Inquiry made 49 recommendations to the government
01:36 in an effort to reduce Tasmania's consistently high road toll.
01:41 They include increasing safety measures around schools, having a consistent approach to managing
01:47 speed limits and re-establishing a dedicated traffic enforcement command.
01:53 The Tasmanian government supported all but six of the recommendations.
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