Electronic stability control (ESC) has the potential to save more than 10,000 lives per year, according to a June 2006 study by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS). This report suggests that stability control is among the greatest safety advances since the safety belt, rivaling air bags' life-saving potential.

ESC helps avoid an accident altogether, reducing fatalities as well as injuries and injury severity. Combined with air bags, this increasingly prevalent technology makes today's cars even safer and should be sought by new-car buyers, as CR has recommended for years.

ESC reduces the risk of fatal multi-vehicle crashes by 32 percent and fatal single-vehicle crashes by 56 percent, according to the IIHS study. Extrapolating from those numbers, the institute estimates that if all vehicles on the road in 2005 had been equipped with ESC, then 10,000 of the 34,000 fatal crashes could have been avoided.

ESC provides an even greater safety benefit for SUVs. This is because it can prevent a vehicle from getting into a situation where it could roll over, a particularly lethal type of crash seen more frequently with tall vehicles. ESC reduces the risk of fatal single-vehicle SUV rollovers by 80 percent, the study indicated. Rollover prevention for cars was about the same, but fatal rollovers are less common for cars than they are for SUVs.

Since 2001, Consumer Reports has been urging carmakers and the government to make ESC standard on all SUVs. The benefits of ESC in keeping a vehicle in control and on its intended path have been evident from the emergency-handling tests that we perform on every tested vehicle (see our Guide to Safety Features). Today, ESC is standard on 40 percent of 2006 passenger-vehicle models, or more than 100, and it is optional on 60 others. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) provides a complete list of new vehicles available with ESC.

The full version of the IIHS report is available on the institute's Web site, www.iihs.org.