As car safety features improve, so do the number of car crashes?!

[thewayne]

My Matrix has to be the most safety-feature equipped car that I've ever owned. I don't drive any faster in it than before, I'm driving at the same speeds that I've driven at for probably 20 years (I don't like paying speeding tickets, they cost lots of money. then again, if you don't pay speeding tickets....). But I can definitely see the point of the study. Unfortunately they don't cite real-world data, if they expanded their study to pull up accident records from major cities and states and analyzed model years (i.e. car age vs year being studied) I think that would be more significant.

Maybe I'll do that as a study if I ever have to do a statistics paper.

http://blog.wired.com/cars/2007/05/as_car_safety_i.html

Comments

[thedragonweaver.livejournal.com]

...and the study does not mention one very pertinent fact: Though car crashes may be on the upswing, their survivability is increasing rapidly. In other words, though you may be more likely to get into a crash, seatbelts and airbags and crumple zones and safety glass means that a crash that might have killed you in a 1960s era car won't kill you in a 2000s era car.

Read some EMT accounts on then vs. now. Impaled on a steering column seems a nasty way to go, but probably not as nasty as getting thrown through a regular glass windshield.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

Actually it did mention reduced injuries: "Accidents increased while injuries to drivers decreased, thanks to..."

The first car of my parent's that I remember was a '69 Impala, I was eight. It had seat belts, I don't think the front seats had shoulder belts. Their next car, a '73 Impala (later my first car) had front seat shoulder belts, but you had to manually link them into the seat belt metal tongue.

I would imagine their previous car, whatever it was, didn't have seat belts in the back.


And yeah, getting impaled on a steering wheel would definitely suck!