The Most Dangerous Part of a Car is the Human Being Behind the Steering Wheel
Accidents on the road are one of the largest contributors to the global death toll and they especially cripple the young and healthy. Are therefore cars as lethal an invention as guns?
According to the World Health Organisation, the 10th leading cause of death in 2002 were road traffic accidents with a 2,1 percent. In the USA, to take an example, driving and firearms have a similar death toll spread across age groups. It is also the most fatal of the accident types.
Car makers have been long working on ways to prevent and minimise injuries in car accidents. Many technologies will hit the market in the next fifteen years that will help the drivers to reduce risks and enhance safety.
Yet these technologies will be inefficient on distracted drivers who will likely keep the death toll in a high. Distractions whilst driving have been always a cause of accidents. In the last decade approximately 7.9 million accidents a year have been reported. Almost two million in the USA alone. However, since the rise of the smartphones this trend is growing alarmingly high.
We are facing an age of increasing mobility, increasing safety in cars, but above all increasing potential for distractions whilst driving. Law-makers will try to find ways to remove the sources of distraction but still the driver will be faced with the cost of opportunity of driving and not being able to be online. A strong drive for being online is a matter of fact though.
Seemingly we will see a big conflict of interests, far stronger than the one we knew in the eighties and nineties; drinking and driving. How many lives will this conflict of interests cost? And lives of the young and healthy especially.
Instead of trying to gain an already tough fight by force, the law-makers would do us all a much better service if they would altogether set the legal framework to propose an alternative to the driver: if you want to drive, go ahead but just drive. If you want to do anything else put your autonomous car in self drive mode, lay back, turn your seat around, and get online, sleep, read…
In addition to the active benefits of an autonomous car, we also have the passive benefits. An autonomous car will require redundant systems to scan for obstacles and moving objects and persons around. In this manner being altogether far more efficient avoiding accidents caused by pedestrians, especially distracted pedestrians.
