Both the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety and the Highway Loss Data Institute have officially appointed David Harkey as their president, effective January 2018.
The director of the University of North Carolina Highway Safety Research Center since 2006, Harkey will be expected to replace Adrian Lund, who has served as IIHS-HLDI president since 2006. With the announcement, Harkey has pointed to advanced technologies as the future of safety–but warns their full benefits may only be seen over decades.
“Even with so much progress, it is unacceptable that nearly 100 lives are still lost in crashes every day. As we work with our safety partners toward the goal of zero crash deaths, we will continue to conduct high-quality research about ways to reduce crashes and the deaths, injuries, and property damage that result from them,” Harkey said. “We will build on the Institutes’ groundbreaking research and testing of crash avoidance technologies — the foundation for autonomous vehicles — to steer consumers toward the systems that perform the best and speed the adoption of effective systems on all new vehicles. And we are positioned to evaluate current and future automated vehicle technologies at our expanded Vehicle Research Center.”
Harkey brings more than 30 years of road safety research experience to his new role. He will be aided in this by insurers, who support the efforts of the institutes to improve highways and vehicles safer. In the past, the organization has tackled such issues as alcohol-impaired driving, graduated licensing laws for teen drivers, higher safety belt use rates, airbags and more crashworthy vehicles.