Does it really hurt consumers if carmakers are bragging about doing well on tests? I'd argue that it might: NHTSA wants to encourage automakers to build safer

Does it really hurt consumers if carmakers are bragging about doing well on tests? I'd argue that it might: NHTSA wants to encourage automakers to build safer cars. One way to do that is to provide them with detailed information on the results ("scores") of its tests, so that automakers can benchmark their engineering against each other and tune individual safety features as needed. Another way is to aggregate those results for each model and publish a consumer-friendly figure that automakers are motivated to be able to advertise as a "stamp of approval". What they don't want is automakers getting into NHTSA test "hot-rodding" games, focusing their efforts on topping the individual tests by some small relative figure in order to claim things like "safest car ever". In an environment like that, NHTSA has to either stop publishing detailed results, or keep the mechanics of their testing secret in an attempt to prevent "benchmark gaming" of the kind we see all the time in technology. That sounds like an NHTSA that is competing with automakers rather than working with them, and I suspect that is how consumers could be ultimately hurt.