Reuters – US President Donald Trump has made the United States the first country in the world to install tinting in all new cars and SUVs and plans to install it in new passenger vehicles next year.
In a press conference on Wednesday, Trump said that the government would start installing the tinting by the end of 2021, with commercial vehicles expected to follow by 2022.
“Tinting is going to be done on a commercial basis,” Trump said.
“And the government will be starting to do that at the beginning of 2022, and that’s going to go up to the end.
That’s going be happening in 2021.”
Trump said that tinting was part of a larger government plan to protect public health and safety.
“The whole thing will be done at the end, and they’re going to put it on,” he said.
“We’re not going to do anything to put up windows.
We’re going go ahead and do the same thing we’ve been doing for the past several years.”
Trump’s announcement comes as a growing number of states, including California, Oregon and Washington, are considering installing tinting on new vehicles and SUV’s.
The US has seen an uptick in vehicle accidents and fatalities due to the use of tinting, as cars and trucks with tinting are often more susceptible to air pollution, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
A report published in the journal Preventive Medicine by the University of Washington found that more than one million Americans had died from air pollution in 2016.
The study, which was published earlier this month, found that tinted windows were associated with a nearly three-fold increase in the risk of a fatal car crash.
“A car is almost four times more likely to crash if a window is tinted than if it is not,” said study author and UW professor of epidemiology, Paul C. Stemmer, in a statement.
“In a study that examined the association between window tintedness and the risk for fatal and nonfatal crashes, we found that people who wear tinted windowpans are almost twice as likely to be killed in a crash than people who do not.”
Stemmer added that while the study was limited in its ability to definitively link tinted or non-tinted windows to increased risk of crashes, the results were clear: “Tinted or not, a window needs to be tinted to protect people’s health and well-being.”
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) did not immediately respond to a request for comment.