DEATH DEFIERS: AUTO ACCIDENTS
Way back in 1769, Nicholas Joseph Cugnot took his newly invented, self-propelled, steam-driven automobile prototype out for its maiden voyage. Humming around his Parisian neighborhood at about 2 1/2 miles per hour, Cugnot whacked into a wall, knocking it down, thereby putting the very first automobile accident on the books.
Just look what he started. Every year about 10.7 million auto accidents are added to the roster. From those accidents, about 2.3 million people end up with disabling injuries. And 44,000 end up dead. It’s statistics like these that make the venerated road trip one of the most dangerous activities that everyday folks do. More people die in cars for every 100 million miles traveled than they do in planes, trains, or buses.
“Car crashes are the leading cause of death for people ages 1 to 34,” says Stephanie Faul, communications director of the American Automobile Association’s (AAA) Foundation for Traffic Safety in Washington, D.C. “Driving is the most dangerous thing the average person does every day.” That said, driving isn’t nearly as deadly as it used to be, thanks to public education about safety and better engineering in the automobile industry. But we still have a long way to go, says Faul.
Most of us can remember a day not too long ago when the biggest safety feature in cars was lap belts that nobody bothered wearing. Then shoulder belts came. Soon after, safety bugs and crash test dummies were appearing in public service announcements telling us that buckling up saves lives. States started making it illegal not to wear a seat belt. Today, cars are sold as much by their plethora of safety features like antilock brakes and daytime running lights as they are by cost and color.
The safety push has paid off. During the past 80 years, the number of deaths for every 10,000 registered passenger vehicles has plummeted 94 percent. Way back in 1912, there were 3,100 car crash deaths on record, even though there were only 950,000 registered vehicles driving on U.S. roads. In 1995, almost 44,000 people died on American roadways, but we also had more than 204 million registered cars driving around out there. Just wearing seat belts has saved almost 10,000 lives during the past 10 years, say statisticians.
“If folks were willing, we could make cars even safer,” says Tim Kennedy of the National Safety Council, pointing to the National Association of Stock Car Racing (NASCAR) drivers who routinely emerge from their mangled wreckage unscathed. “If we were willing to wear helmets and five-point safety belts that crossed both shoulders and around our waists, we could be a whole lot safer. We could also build cages inside our cars like Indy drivers have. But there’s only so much the public is willing to accept.”
*101/36/5*
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