Just several days earlier, about 15 people lost their lives in a bus crash. A little after that, another six people lost their lives in a car which lost control and hit a tree.

I will safely predict that the roadkill and mayhem on our roads will increase despite good infrastructure and better mantainence. Road safety in developed countries is reaching a consistent standard.

This is true also for recently poor countries like South Korea, who had the worst league tables in the OECD. On an average day, a motorist heading out onto Seoul’s roads was 11 times more likely to have a fatal accident than the same motorist in heading out in the heart of London.

What changed? The relevant Korean ministries benchmarked the best in the OECD and looked carefully at their data to implement policies that would eventually save lives of its citizens.

Copying Australia’s method of using Safe-T-Cams which monitor the average speed over an entire journey as well as implementing recommendations from the National Highway and Traffic Safety Administration (United States), European New Car Assesment program (Europe) and the Australian New Car Assessment Program (ANCAP), Korea was able to halve the number of fatalities on the road between 1998 to 2010.

By far the most important policy is the mandatory inclusion of the Electronic Stability Control/Program (ESP) in all new vehicles. This is a system where an on board computer regulates engine power and braking to each individual wheel, to ensure that the vehicle does not skid and maintains the intended input from the steering wheel.

ESP reacts faster than a typical driver, and monitors the vehicles condition several thousand times a second. Crucially, the cheapest place to install this technology is on the manufacturing floor, as it cannot be retrofitted to an existing vehicle.

All members (this includes motoring authorities in the EU, United States , Australia and Japan) agree that its inclusion would prevent one in every three fatal car crashes. These countries, in which South Korea is a part of this group, will gradually make it illegal for a new car to be sold without ESP in all member countries. In every new vehicle, ESP adds an extra RM 800 to the total cost of the car.

What’s shocking is that Malaysian manufacturers, being partners having access to this technology has never made it standard (or even an option!) on their vehicles. Mitsubishi, which had partnered with Proton in the past was a key player in inventing ESP in the early 1990s.

Perodua, who have a tagline ‘Building cars, People first’ are partnered with Daihatsu and parent company Toyota, which have made this feature standard on their vehicles for many years.

The Malaysian motoring industry has a responsible body which collects data and monitors its members. To its head, Aishah Ahmad, I have this to say: If RM800 stood in the way of your son or daughter dying in a car crash, what’s it really worth?