I'm not sure people care what the result of the test is, if it costs them money or a feature they want more. That's just how Americans are.
I will say that people seem to put up with emissions standards, so it wouldn't be unthinkable to add some standards that improve the safety of other road users. But as the other comments mention, it's a hard sell; most Americans think the people on the sidewalk or on bikes should be driving instead.
Well, the safety features are for the purchaser in that case. If you let your cat drive and he goes off a cliff, you survive. That's worth an extra $1000! We're talking about a new thing; safety for people other than the people in the car.
That's what the original article is about; people buy heavy cars so that they are more likely to survive the accident than whoever they hit.
Probably the idea is to somewhat sneak that in through the back door, i.e. hope that car manufacturers would be too embarrassed to advertise with a bad crash test result, even if the bad result was "only" due to lack of pedestrian safety.
If even one car model gets changed as a result of this, that would already represent a possible decrease in deaths. It doesn't have to be a total, dominating success to be a net positive.
I wouldn’t even really call it a backdoor. The equivalent European and Australian tests already have this, and they have not seen our recent uptick in deaths.
I will say that people seem to put up with emissions standards, so it wouldn't be unthinkable to add some standards that improve the safety of other road users. But as the other comments mention, it's a hard sell; most Americans think the people on the sidewalk or on bikes should be driving instead.