US Cars Strike Out On Safety

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Nov 22, 5:58AM EST

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In yet another sign of why inventories are so high for US car manufacturers, the Institute for Highway Safety said that a number of foreign cars made its list of 2007 model "safest cars". No domestic models made the list. The reason appears to be that so few American cars have electronic stability control which senses when a car is in trouble and applies the necessary braking.

Cars from Audi, Saab, Subaru, Mercedes, Honda, Volvo, and Acura made the list. Especially embarrasing for US companies was that Hyundai, the Korean manufactuer with only a sliver of the American market, had two vehicles which received accolades.

All Detroit needed was another well-publicized reason for people to buy competing products. Without a willingness to be first to market with better safety technology, the got one.

Douglas A. McIntyre can be reached at [email protected]. He does not won securities in companies that he writes about.

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.