This Day in History: Transformative Motor Vehicle Safety Law Passed 50 Years Ago

President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law the vehicle safety bill after the U.S. Senate passed the legislation on this date 50 years ago (Image/lbjlibrary.org)

It was exactly 50 years ago today when the U.S. Senate passed legislation that created the nation’s first mandatory federal safety standards for motor vehicles.

A 76-0 vote paved the way for the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act to become law after LBJ changed everything forever.

Not THAT LBJ.

We’re talking about President Lyndon B. Johnson who signed the bill into law a few months later.

“For the first time in our history,” Johnson said, “we can mount a truly comprehensive attack on the rising toll of death and destruction on the nation’s highways that last year alone claimed 50,000 lives…We can no longer tolerate such anarchy on wheels.”

You can read a bit here from Road & Track about how vehicle safety has evolved though the years, and you can learn more from History here about how the legislation first came to be and how one of our nation’s most successful third-party U.S. presidential candidates played a major role in its creation.