Criticism
The IIHS has come under scrutiny on several occasions since the 1980s over what some consider unfair bias against certain vehicle types, namely some small pickups and certain types of motorcycles. Since the IIHS first-and-foremost represents the interests of the 80 insurance companies from which it receives its funding, critics such as the American Motorcyclist Association have suggested that the IIHS sometimes seeks to influence legislation aimed at making insurance companies more profitable, rather than benefitting the public interest.
In 1980, the IIHS helped 60 Minutes produce a report showing the Jeep CJ rolling over eight times in 435 test runs conducted by a robotic driving apparatus. The testing was criticized as unrealistic in an editorial in National Review
The IIHS released a report in 2007 suggesting that certain types of motorcycles be either banned or restricted from use on public roads, specifically sport bikes, after lumping together several different types of non-sport motorbikes into makeshift categories, allegedly to skew the crash data in favor of its argument. The 2007 report mirrored a similar IIHS study released in 1987, which was claimed by the IIHS to be based on findings in the famous Hurt Report motorcycle crash study, and which was used to influence U.S. Sen. John Danforth into proposing a law that would have mandated horsepower limits for bikes sold in America. Dr. Hugh H. "Harry" Hurt, Jr., the noted author of the Hurt Report, called the 1987 IIHS study "sloppy" and "fatally flawed".
Citing its similarities to the 1987 report, AMA called the 2007 IIHS report "... a bike classification shell game". An AMA news release stated: "We beat the IIHS sportbike ban, and we even got Sen. Danforth on our side, saying that he recognized that the AMA had the constituent interest in motorcycle safety and that his IIHS-backed bill was a 'dead-end street.'".
Ed Moreland, AMA vice president for government relations, said of the 2007 report: "This kind of flawed report, passed off as scientific research, has the potential to do great damage. At the very least, it can create false perceptions we’ll have to fight for years. And at worst, it could lead to restrictive laws that have no basis in reality.”
In the IIHS' annual reports on vehicle safety they frequently miscorrelate vehicle safety with the number of driver deaths each year. Their calculation of "Death Rate" selectively excludes the number of non-fatal crashes that occur; without this data, the actual likelihood of dying in a crash is simply unknown. Nonetheless, the IIHS has used this method for 22 years to determine the safest vehicles.
Read more about this topic: Insurance Institute For Highway Safety
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art—and, by analogy, our own experience—more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“... criticism ... makes very little dent upon me, unless I think there is some real justification and something should be done.”
—Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962)
“Unless criticism refuses to take itself quite so seriously or at least to permit its readers not to, it will inevitably continue to reflect the finicky canons of the genteel tradition and the depressing pieties of the Culture Religion of Modernism.”
—Leslie Fiedler (b. 1917)