A big motorway pileup happened over here today involving over 100 cars, yet nobody was killed. Sheppey crash: chaos in Kent as 200 are injured in 100-vehicle pile-up | Mail Online Judging by some of the damage some people were travelling over 60 mph or more. Now if this accident had happened ten years ago a few people who would be no more and if it was in the early 90's you would be counting deaths in double digits. (wonder how the insurers will sort this one out! )
Cars get hurt in accidents more these days than people do, since they're made from plastic and have crumple zones and are rather more carefully engineered than the buggys we grew up with. I despise lawyers (solicitor? barrister?) but they do have their uses. It's a good trade-off in many cases, but one of these days my granddaughter is going to wonder what the heck a fender-bender is (was) since even the most trivial contact with another car will send you to the body shop for hundreds (or thousands) of Euros worth of repair. Oh wait. That's not right in your case. You still use BPS......so think dollars and divide in half! There's also airbags, Pre-collision systems, and about a thousand monitoring cameras per mile (kilometer) and nearly instant police and medical dispatch to sweep up the pieces. However (comma!) Here in America we're starting to have problems with distracted driving. It's probably not much of a problem over on the Continent because your traffic enforcement would cause riots in the streets over here, but Americans are THE WORST drivers on the planet, and they think that they have a right not to be monitored on public roads, so I expect that distracted drivers will outpace drink drivers at killing our citizens on the roads shortly. Your roads are also FAR more contested than ours are. It's harder to have a fatal accident when you're motoring along at 50kph in gridlock traffic.
I'd say so. Over here, over the past few decades, speeds have increased, number of drivers has increased, miles have increased, distractions have increased, and driver behavior has not improved, yet driving deaths have decreased sharply. Well, drunk driving has decreased, but not enough to account for the much of the difference. Likewise, roadside obstacles have been softened, and medical care has improved. But car safety improvements must be a huge factor.
I just heard this on the BBC news and thought exactly the same thing. I remember hearing about this one in 1991, where ten people died.
I think it's because safety aids have now been out for some time and have worked their way down to what now are older cars. OK a 10 year old car isn't as safe as one from now but it's much safer than a 20 year old car. Talking of that, my parents had a head on crash last week in their 13 year old Renault at a combined speed of about 50 or 60 mph. They walked away as did the other driver. Injured with aches and pains but no broken bones or worse. All the air bags and safety systems still worked which at 13 years old was probably quite something, but comforting to know too. So all the money invested in safety equipment by manufacturers over the years appears to be worth every penny.
When cars are equipped with self driving vehicles for example google car you will see less accidents and less traffic Google driverless car - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Not if it's as reliable as my android phone! Don't fancy having to reboot my car every other day or pull the battery out for 5 seconds when it hangs.
Lol. Already many parts of the technology are already in place for example early breaking and self parking. Your phone needs to be fixed or replaced. I have an iPhone and it works great. A new version 5S is being announced Sept 10,
Cars are far safer than they used to be, but I wonder if it's given drivers a false sense of security. I recall one accident investigator of some sort saying that the best safety feature a car could have is a big spike on the steering wheel.
