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Comment by concordDance | Hacker News Reader

I would be immensely surprised if they ended up actually costing $127 in practice. I expect that's very much a best case scenario (lowest bidder estimate for unregulated side guards with no installation costs).

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That $127 a trailer is the differences in cost and it was in 1980s dollars. So I would expect a retrofit to be whatever the cost of the Mansfield bars are on their own, plus labor, as it would cost today.

Fortunately the IIHS has been pushing trailer manufacturers to make the change, so newer trailers would not need a retrofit.

And your support for this assertion is...?

Experience reading articles that try and push a point. They always use the most favourable estimates.

And even if it were double? Or triple? Still seems negligible given the impact and even the margin of profit per load.

It's only worth doing if it actually saves enough lives per $ to be better than the other things we could do with that money. For context, NICE currently only pays for treatments that give over 1 QALY per £30k because that's all the NHS budget can support. If those bars cost $500 and needed to be installed on five million trucks and only saved 20 lives on average across the country then that would be an extremely poor return on investment and the money should be put towards cancer screening or paying off the national debt or improved road signage or something.

$500 is well more than triple the estimated cost per truck, and we already know that at least 400 people are being killed per year in the US. Likely far more, not to mention the grievously injured. Cost per unit would likely come down over time anyway as production practices improve, like with most goods. I understand the logic behind cost/benefit, but the math is pretty damn obvious here.

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