Backseat Driver: The Role of Data in Great Car Safety Debates

Buying the safest car for your family shouldn’t be up for debate.

Yet for decades, car safety advocates, manufacturers, and lawmakers in the United States have clashed over whether to make automobiles safer. All sides armed themselves with data in the hopes of winning the great car safety debates. In this way, crash statistics and the analysts who studied them made history. But data were always in the backseat, merely supporting different points of view. That is, until now.

With car safety, i...