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Is that super-safe car actually putting you at a greater risk of harm on the road… because of your own driving? It sounds crazy, I know. But it’s an interesting theory to consider… safer cars can actually make roads more dangerous, due to the fact that we become lax behind the wheel. If you are thinking that this sounds about as credible as the theory that you are actually better off not wearing a seatbelt, then read on. I read an interesting article recently that raised a debate in my mind over driving behavior and how insurance rates are drummed up by insurance companies.

The name for this crazy-sounding theory is the Peltzman Effect. The Peltzman Effect is generally accepted to be true – for lots of things, and not just driving theory – and holds that, as people get the impression of greater safety, they will take on greater risks with the theory that they are not actually in danger. This is built on the assumption that people have a predetermined tolerance for risk and then tweak that level up and down accordingly based on their environments. In the example I read, it was suggested that, If you build a better football helmet, players will simply ram their skulls together harder. If you create safer cars, people will drive faster and take other reckless risks.

Of course, there is always a risk in this kind of situation that the added risks will cancel out the benefits of the additional safety measures – or, even worse, add new and unprecedented risks. Football players who once feared little scarier than a concussion are now playing so hard with their “safer” helmets that there is mounting proof that many are leaving the same with lifelong brain damage. If our safer cars make us feel comfortable enough to squabble with our spouse, talk on the phone, or eat a three-course dinner behind the wheel, what risks are we opening ourselves up to?

The Peltzman theory was coined in honor of University of Chicago economist Sam Peltzman, who conceived the theory in 1975 after finding that accident rates had remained stagnant in the 1960s following the introduction of federal auto-safety regulations. When drivers felt protected, they drove more recklessly, Peltzman concluded, putting pedestrians, cyclists and others at greater risk. In the long years since then, evidence that the Peltzman Effect offsets the benefits as a whole has been refuted by the fact that car crash deaths have dropped by a large number even as safety laws have drastically increased.

A spokesman for the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, Russ Rader, says that there is “some evidence that safety features that people get direct feedback from do cause them to drive less carefully, and the best example is studded snow tires.” When people have these special tires, they don’t fear the snow as much, and are prone to drive in a reckless way. Still, Rader admits, there is no evidence that things like air bags and electronic stability, which do NOT give drivers direct feedback, have the same detrimental impact on safety.

Let’s talk about life before mandatory seat belts. Back in 1980, before laws were passed that made safety restraints mandatory in new cars, some fifty-one thousand people were killed in car accidents every year in this country. That’s almost three and half deaths per one hundred million vehicle trip miles. In 2010, just thirty-three thousand people were killed in car crashes. That’s just over one death in just as many vehicle trip miles. The article I read even links to a simulation of a crash between a 1959 Chevy and a 2009 Chevy. The driver of the first car would have died instantly in the collision. The driver of the second would likely walk away with little more than a knee injury.

Rader points out that, if the Peltzman Effect were having a “significant” impact on drivers and their ability to drive safely even in the face of new safety standards, “then we would not have seen the dramatic reductions in crashes and fatalities that have occurred over the last 50 years, since auto safety regulations were first implemented.” One thing is true – the Peltzman Effect is a difficult thing to prove. There are just too many variables that impact safety and accidents in cars and on the roads where they drive. Some experts in the article I read actually joke darkly that “the safest cars would be those with unrestrained drivers facing a dagger on the steering column.” In other words, drivers the most aware of their lack of safety are actually the ones who drive the safest!

In 2007, a team of two university economists managed to confirm the Peltzman Effect with a very specific subset of cars on the road – NASCAR vehicles. Between 1972 and 1993, they were able to use track data to confirm that racecar drivers actually drove more recklessly as cars became safer. While it’s true that total injuries did decrease, they didn’t go down as much as might be expected with regard to the higher safety standards, probably because drivers were compensating for these improvements with riskier behavior. This is, they admitted, of a dubious yet actual benefit to NASCAR, since crashes increase viewership.

Of course, the normal drivers we encounter every day on the road don’t get prizes for driving like crazed yahoos. What they do get as an incentive to drive better is insurance discounts for having safety devices installed. They do get the chance to live another day and do even more yahoo things. Plus, they are “rewarded” with a better chance at making it alive out of the accidents that technology is powerless to prevent. So what happens off the racetrack? Here, too, multiple studies have found that drivers tend to behave in a riskier or more aggressive fashion when they believe themselves better protected, either with anti-lock brakes, four-wheel drive, studded snow tires or simply larger vehicles.

Of course, this is all to the detriment of those in smaller cars. Pickups and SUVs may be well equipped to handle a crash, which makes these drivers cockier and more confident, but those in smaller cars stand to take on greater damage in a collision with a bigger auto. A notable 2008 study out of West Virginia took into account deadly car crashes between the years of 1995 and 2006. They found definitely that SUVs were almost three times more likely to cause an accident than other passenger cars.

Something else to consider is what Janos Wimpffen, the owner of Sports Car Racing Research Associates, a transportation consultancy, calls “the Peltzman Effect gone wild.” This refers to the tendency of semiautomated safety devices, such as those that monitor distance from another vehicle, to potentially breed a really scary sense of complacency behind the wheel. If everyone had small and relatively fragile cars, he says, people would probably drive defensively as a regular thing. They would understand the risks of consequences. On the other hand, people in very big cars, as he calls them, tend to take corresponding levels of risk.