It’s not the safety alert buzzer that’s the distraction, it’s the incoming message alert that’s the distraction. In 2010 about 20% of the US population had a smartphone. In 2018 it was 70%. Distracted driving was already an issue with people talking and texting on dumb phones, and it has just gotten worse as the phones have gotten more addicting.
Driver aides and automation will help pull back some of this increase, just in time for nationwide legalized marijuana.
So - you suggest that there have actually been MORE SIGNIFICANT gains in safety over the past decade or so than the stats seem to indicate, but that those gains were in part offset by phones/age? Sounds reasonable.
I do not have any “driver assist” notifications on my car, and have only driven/ridden in such cars infrequently. Since I’m unfamiliar with them, I’m not a good example. But I have occasionally found it mildly “startling” to have a light flash and/or a buzzer sound - “alerting” me to some non-issue that I was already aware of. And the 2 guys I have spoken with about such alerts have said that they turned the majority of them off, as they went off in what the drivers considered normal driving conditions.
I DO use/enjoy my rearview camera for parking. And the one alert I would like is for cross traffic in parking lots when backing out of a space. But both of those would likely concern body damage rather than fatalities/serious injuries.
Airbags became a common option on cars in the late 1980s and early 1990s; the last car I bought that didn’t have an airbag was a 1991 Mazda Protege (it was an option on higher-level trim packages, but not on the trim level that I’d bought). And, IIRC, in that era, sometimes only the driver had an airbag.
In the U.S., the law began requiring a “passive restraint system” in new cars in 1989. However, that law allowed the system to be either an airbag, or an automatic seatbelt (which was what my Mazda had). The law didn’t start to require airbags (for both the driver and front seat passenger) until 1998, so my guess is that you would start really seeing the impact of airbags on the stats in the 1990s and 2000s, as they became more widespread in service.
I have one small data point. One of our cars is a 2011 Kia Sorento. A couple of years ago I came across an index that showed how many people had been killed in various models of cars after each had been on the market so many years (I forget, but I think 2 or 3 years). For the first time ever in their survey, no one had been killed in a vehicle, actually two different cars made it. The 2011 Sorento was one of them. And it was a very popular model, we used to see them all over the place after we bought one of the first ones.
It was just a simple list, no attempt to correlate mileage or anything else. And the Kia only has like 4 or 6 airbags. Our 2014 Buick Encore has 14.
yeah, they’re starting at the high end and trickling down. up until now, the only cars I’ve driven with the full suite of ADAS features have been Lincoln, Cadillac, Mercedes, Audi, etc.
Right I mentioned phones but change in demographics is probably another one. More old people lately. And fewer people in prime young idiot driving age range is probably also buried somewhere in the fatality rate reductions of previous decades, along with car improvements and other things.
And again the clear effect of substance abuse on life expectancy directly from drug overdose (though opiod rather than marijuana) lately probably points to more car fatalities from drug abuse also.
Again if look at the IIHS stats by car type, if you have a fairly big luxury car/SUV and drive like the typical driver of those vehicles, your personal fatality risk in a car accident is probably close to the zero level several models have recorded in recent years. The absolute zeroes are statistical anomalies, similar models usually have some very low non-zero death rate. But it really depends enormously how you drive, then put on top of that a high level of protection from accidents that are completely not your fault and it’s largely gone as a real risk in life. If you really are a safe driver (maybe most people think they are safer than average but obviously can’t all be, but some people really are).
I chose to look at the deaths per miles driven, since there has been some discussion that safer cars lead to more driving and thus an increase in the accident and death rate, relative to what it would have been if there were constant miles per person. (Not an increase in absolute terms, of course.)
I haven’t plotted those numbers, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they looked the same. The improvements from air bags, for instance, only involve those who would have been killed even if they were using seat belts.
Using the dubious hypothesis that 2 WAGs will equal knowledge, if as I think I heard, pickup trucks are less safe than cars, and if, as I think I heard, pickup truck sales are increasing, does this shed any light on the slower rate of safety of late?
I remember that when heavy vans and SUVs were introduced, drivers in them were safer but drivers in the cars they hit were less safe. Might be true for pickup trucks also. But see above for the real reason for the increase.
This is not well understood, but is probably mostly due to cell phone use.
Poke around the site of the insurance institute of highway safety web site. They have studied all sorts of specific features, drilling down to VIN data so they can compare the same vehicle with and without various features. Most of the newer crash avoidance systems do, in fact, reduce the number of incidents (although they sometimes increase the average cost, since they feature expensive sensors on the perimeter of the car) with the notable exception of the lane departure warning, which might actually increase the number of fender-benders. (Probably because it startles drivers.) But vehicle stability control, automatic braking, blind-spot warnings, and many other newer features appear to be winners.
I graphed that too, but the problem was that the differences were pretty small- it looked mostly like an exponential decrease, in that it started really high early on (lots of deaths, not many miles driven), and tapered/leveled out fairly fast.
Doing it by population let the differences show more prominently. For example, you can see a precipitous drop between 1972 and 1973 (seat belts?), another between 1979-1982 (?), a third in 1987-1991(mandatory seat belt laws?), a fourth in 2004-2010 (?).
More interestingly, there’s a huge rise between 1960 and 1965.