The Mainstream Media has a thing about safety-related stories. It started with the “if it bleeds it leads” paradigm, and has become a predictable hobbyhorse thanks to the fact that you’d have to be the worst kind of sociopath to even consider arguing against more safety. If the MSM likes anything more than trench-warfare debates, it’s coming together afterward over a hot cup of won’t someone think of the children? But facts are facts, and as the WSJ reports, driving a car has literally never been safer. There were 1.19 deaths for every 100 million vehicle miles traveled in the second quarter of 2009, the lowest number since the NHTSA began keeping statistics in the 1970s. And the IIHS’s recent gee-whiz test results don’t even tell the whole story, although they do indicate that the lobbying group may be losing some relevance. Beyond passive safety features like improved steel, engineering and airbags, active safety features like stability and traction control are preventing a great number of deaths. As are roadway improvements like rumble strips and median dividers, not to mention increased DUI and seatbelt enforcement. In short, great strides have been made. Which means it’s time to think about changing the conversation about safety. As the video above proves, we’ll never completely wring the danger out of the practice of piloting tons of metal around at speed, but the latest statistics show that it might be a good time to consider prioritizing lower vehicle weights over a safety-at-all-costs approach. After all, even the most fanatical safety advocates are now focusing on distracted driving and motorcycle deaths.
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Check out the Fiat’s driver side airbag…
Is it supposed to pop like a grape when the driver’s head makes contact?
Safety first?
What if [we] got it wrong?
What if it’s really safety third?
— Mike Rowe, from Dirty Jobs
I disagree Ed — 35,000 deaths are still too many, equating to 96 a day. We wouldn’t tolerate 96 deaths a day from airliner crashes — the entire fleet would be grounded.
We also don’t know how much of the recent decrease is due to the recession. Past downturns have tended to reduce the body count — in the GHW Bush recession, deaths reached a modern-day low of 39,250 in 1992, then increased in fits and starts to the 43K range during 2002-06 before falling again in the current meltdown.
Still we do have something to celebrate: except for motorcyclists, road users are less likely to die on a per capita, per registered vehicle, and per vehicle miles traveled basis than at any time in just about anyone’s memory.
boombox1: “Check out the Fiat’s driver side airbag…
Is it supposed to pop like a grape when the driver’s head makes contact?”
I thought the same thing. It seems like if the airbag was a bit more resilient, the Fiat driver could survive. Otherwise the car seemed to do quite well in the crash.
Re 210delray :
We wouldn’t tolerate 96 deaths a day from airliner crashes — the entire fleet would be grounded.
I agree – we (society) would not accept such a casualty count – however we do accept this number from our automobile drivers.
How many airline pilots get to keep on flying after having multiple DUI’s? Car drivers can – no problem, just pay the fine and wait out the 90 day license suspension. 16 year old flying an Airbus, nope, but they can drive a city bus. Even a 14 year old can drive with a ‘farmers permit’ type license. Old people that no longer have the cognitive ability to drive – we’ve all seen them (and will eventually be them)
Do you see where I’m going with this…
Once again we refuse to hold ourselves accountable for our collective performance and instead blame the car, or engineers responsible.
To harp about the Fiat driver’s (former) head a bit more – the airbag deflating on the right side actually seems to push the head outwards to the left – I wonder if the airbag failed because of a defect or because of the collision.
The low-hanging fruit is probably people who don’t wear seatbelts and those who drink and drive.
Fix those two problems and I’d imagine the death rate would drop dramatically.
I don’t see any safety videos for bikers vs cars.
Why don’t we make some and then try outlawing motorcycles?
**end sarcastic rant**
All these videos do is verify physics and the evolution of safety. I’d take the 500 over any car from 40 years ago.
Safety First is an important slogan when you have some control over the outcome, but Fiat drivers can’t choose what vehicle they collide with, or if. If they knew they’d eventually hit a Q7, they’d never buy the car. Safety choices involve many tradeoffs, including economic and statistical tradeoffs.
Wise shop workers wear safety gear for their job, assuming the risk is there. Drivers often do not assume the risk is present, since they believe they have some control over the situation. This fact enables the sale of small cars.
Manipulating the market by government fiat [pun] in the interest of ultimate safety will either force us all to drive small cars, or large ones.
To see how ‘safety first’ has a paralyzing effect, just look at the US manned space program. It has completely lost the can-do spirit of the 1960s. Every shuttle mission now spends days just doing safety inspections on-orbit (twice), and getting off the ground is ultra restricted by very tight controls on weather, hardware redundancy, emergency landing site problems, and a host of other issues. The result? – late, and very costly flights.
@ KixStart: You are quite right.
@KixStart: IIRC 1/4 motor vehicle accidents in the US are alcohol related, thus the big push towards alcohol-ignition interlocks.
Are there any numbers at hand relating the fatalities in road accidents to the number of “successful” trips?
How high is the probability to die in a car accident?
How many people die in an occupational accident in the same period? Any numbers on that?
In Ontario we have the toughest DUI laws in North America.
Saturday night a 21 year old drunk in a BMW doing 200 Kph{125mph} in an 80kph zone,sliced a Honda minivan in half,killing three. The drunken BMW driver survived.
Point is,all the rules and regulation in the world,won’t compensate for a lack of common sense.
The low-hanging fruit is probably people who don’t wear seatbelts and those who drink and drive. Fix those two problems and I’d imagine the death rate would drop dramatically.
The Intertooobz be your friend:
http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Main/index.aspx
Without spending too much time on this, the text to the left of the chart states that 32% of all fatal crashes involve booze-impaired driving.
Then if you click on the Reports tab, then Restraints, you’ll see that in 2008 28% of drivers involved in fatal crashes were not using restraint although another section shows that number at 29.8% so let’s be sloppy and just say 30%.
What a quick glance doesn’t show is how much overlap there is between those two statistics, ie., how many drunk drivers weren’t wearing restraint.
Also, forget curbing the drunk driving fatality percentage. It’s remained constant (anywhere from 30-33%) since 1994. Short of locking up booze-fueled manslaughtering asshats (ala a “War On Drunk Driving) the way we do minor drug offenses (and probably way more justified since I can’t remember the last time a pothead killed somebody with a car, or at least in the numbers seen with booze), it looks like a 1/3 of all fatalities to drunk driving rate is probably the base.
Seat belts? We probably have more ability to change cultural trends in that regard although I’m surprise the glibertarian/keepyourgubmintlawsoffme types that dominate this site don’t howl at mandatory seat belt laws the way they do everything else with such a whiff of the evil gubmint about it.
I disagree Ed — 35,000 deaths are still too many, equating to 96 a day. We wouldn’t tolerate 96 deaths a day from airliner crashes — the entire fleet would be grounded.
The answer is simply because people don’t pilot their own personal airliners. We automatically assume that of he vast majority of those 96 deaths were caused by idiots, therefore no hue & cry.
I actually agree with the article. The time has come to stop the “what about the children” arguments and start getting realistic.
–Chuck
The problem is that the massive vehicles will make everyone less safe if everyone were to buy one. Other than the fact that it’s a little different when you collide into something that’s just as heavy, braking distances get longer and traffic gets worse, with all the spatially challenged vehicles clogging the roads.
I’ll take the vehicle that gives me the best chance to avoid a collision in the first place, a small car, and take an active approach to avoiding collisions, instead of driving while distracted like so many others that I see on the road. If I die in my small car, at least I will have died fighting the good fight. And I had fun doing it.
KixStart has it, but I’d add unnecessary additional speed to the list.
Sudden deceleration is VERY BAD for the human body.
I believe many drivers think of cuts and broken bones when they think about the risks of crashes, but it’s actually organ damage and internal bleeding that kills them. The “blunt force” trauma is internal not external mostly.
In time, the sizes of vehicles on the road will normalise again I believe, or the larger vehicles deliberately speed limited. It just won’t be affordable (injury wise) to charge around in your 4500lbs monster. If you limited the top speed of an SUV to 40mph, less people would choose them.
So many people spend so much time in automobiles that even a tiny risk will generate large numbers of casualties. If all you consider is the total, then jumping off the Empire State Building is “safe” by comparison.
Much was made of dropping the threshold for DUI from .1% to .08%. Yet, whenever I hear about a drunk who caused a serious accident, his alcohol level was .15% or higher. Suppose someone has one or two glasses of wine with dinner and, while stopped for a red light on the way home, is rear-ended by a cell phone user. Will alcohol be considered a contributing factor in the accident?
The above video was a German car magizine propaganda demonstration (Volkswagen?) in order to convince Germans not to by the hot selling Cinq (as they call them in Britain). Italian Car magizines freaked, demanding they test the Q7 against an IVECO transport (big Fiat) & see what results they have. Over all I think the Fiat performed better then expected. I think Smart or even a Polo would have had worse consequences. Any ways, lighter is safer- and just like in hockey all the saftey equipment has made the sport more dangerous, I think the same goes for cars. “If they put bayuonets on steering wheels I think people would drive more carefully.”
Yeah, 35,000 fatalities a year is only 10x the number of people killed on 9/11. The job of improving automotive safety must be pretty much wrapped up …..
Just for kicks I’d like to see a 500 square off (or should that be frontal-offset-off?) against a new A1. That would be an even fairer matchup than a Q7 vs an IVECO.
That was not a “propaganda” demo. They have e.g. crashed an S class Mercedes with a Smart, too, in order to show that even when driving a small car you have a chance to survive an accident with a big one.
Kendahl: “Much was made of dropping the threshold for DUI from .1% to .08%. Yet, whenever I hear about a drunk who caused a serious accident, his alcohol level was .15% or higher. Suppose someone has one or two glasses of wine with dinner and, while stopped for a red light on the way home, is rear-ended by a cell phone user. Will alcohol be considered a contributing factor in the accident?”
Yes, it will be. On a similar note, One of my former co-workers got a DUI for blowing a .08% the first time he got caught. He wasn’t even out drinking, but went to dinner with his mom, and had a few glasses of wine. He said it was karma getting him back for all the times he drove home absolutely trashed.
People always accuse ADAC of propaganda when their expectations are not met, for example the Chinese car crash tests. Also, showing only the video is worthless, the final analysis is missing.
Audi results
Fiat results
boombox1 :
October 21st, 2009 at 2:40 pm
Check out the Fiat’s driver side airbag…
Is it supposed to pop like a grape when the driver’s head makes contact?
Yes, real airbags remain inflated for a second or two at most. They have holes in them to allow the gas to escape rapidly, particularly the new two stage airbags.
Most folks who’ve seen hollywood movies and slow mo crash tests think airbags inflate slowly, stay inflated and are comfy cushions. Nothing could be further from the truth – they inflate extremely rapidly (like gunshot fast) and deflate fairly rapidly. They cause ear damage, bruising and broken bones in their own right, which is why you need to avoid crossing your arms when steering. The good news is that they truly save lives.
@FrankCanada :
The above video was a German car magizine propaganda demonstration
You really think ADAC does anti-Fiat propaganda? The same ADAC whose breakdown studies place the Fiat Panda’s reliability right on #3 of the subcompact category?
http://www1.adac.de/Auto_Motorrad/pannenstatistik_maengelforum/pannenstatistik_2008/tab.asp
@ Kendahl: Yes. If a slightly intoxicated driver is stuck in traffic on 410 and a San Antonio bus driver who is texting while driving slams into the back of him, it’s alcohol-related.
You could turn it around and say that it’s the “fault” of people who buy unnecessarily big cars. To follow the line of reasoning used so far, all of us would have to use SUVs to level the playing field when it comes to crash survivability. But then, some idiots would come up with manufacturing and buying even bigger SUVs, or perhaps modifying big trucks for personal use. SUV like that Q7 would stand no chance in a collision with a custom-build Volvo truck. So then, everyone let’s start buying big trucks…where does it end? It comes back to lack of intelligence. The great majority of people don’t need big, heavy vehicles. For 99% of drivers SUVs are stupid, and potentially dangerous to others in normal cars. Doing something just because one can doesn’t mean that it’s a positive thing to do.
99% seems a bit high. But since some people don’t need/like/want them, we should simply ban those child-killing SUV’s.
35,000 deaths are still too many, equating to 96 a day.
It may be or it may not be, but there will come a point at which we will have done virtually everything that is reasonably possible to reduce fatalities. At that point, the rates will plateau and, due to an increasing population, the totals will start to increase.
We need to accept the fact that anything that puts a human body into motion at a relatively high rate of speed is going to expose us to the risk of getting killed or injured. The human body was designed to travel perhaps 2-3 mph safely; even running into a tree at 5 mph could injure or kill someone.
If we want mobility, then we are accepting death as an inevitable outcome for some whose number will come up. We weren’t even designed to travel at the speeds at which a horse can travel, let alone a car. As it stands now, people are far more likely to die from a whole host of diseases, such as diabetes, than they are from driving.