In car safety

Over the past 20 years, vehicle design and the use of safety features have contributed greatly to making crashes more survivable. Things like seatbelts, airbags, side impact bars and crumple zones have undoubtedly saved many thousands of lives.

Cars have changed enormously in living memory, but the thing that hasn’t changed in that time, or indeed for the last 2 million years, is human fallibility – drivers have stayed the same.

However, knowing cars have these features can contribute to more risk for drivers and passengers. If you truly believe you are driving in the safest vehicle around, it sounds like nothing could harm you. How might this affect the way you drive that vehicle? There is a chance you are more likely to take greater risk, believing you are safe and the safety features will lessen the impact of your mistakes. This can lead to overestimating your ability and underestimating the risk.

Humans will make mistakes and some will take great risk. Not everyone is trained to the same level, so there will be different approaches to the same situation.

No matter what features there are in cars to help make crashes more survivable, cars are still crashing and people are still dying. The safety features available cannot guarantee that everyone will walk away from a crash involving at least 1.5 tonnes of metal travelling at speed.

Human factors are a key component in the cause of 95% of all crashes – people make bad choices that lead to crashes. If you could take the human element away from driving, then 95% of crashes wouldn’t happen. Vehicle manufacturers know that we are generally very poor at taking driving seriously, and are starting to introduce robotic features to compensate for poor driving.

Some cars are now fitted with sensors that tell you how close you are to vehicles in front or behind. There is assistance for the driver if the on-board computer senses that braking isn’t sufficient, or that acceleration is too great. 

Some vehicles can alert the driver if they appear to be deviating from their driving lane and there are even systems being developed to sense if a driver is falling asleep, or has alcohol in their body.

Gradually, responsibility for safe driving is being taken from the human and given to robotic systems – because we cannot be trusted to take this responsibly seriously at all times. Clearly it will take many years to reach the situation where we no longer have drivers and passengers, but just passengers, as the driving is being done for us by automated systems.

Until that time, we have to rely on people to drive and accept that we will still see, and hear, about many avoidable, life changing events that kill and injure people on the roads because:

• we take the driving activity for granted, as we do it every day
• we believe our ability is at least sufficient if not very good
• we think “I wont be involved in a crash, and if I am, I have all my safety features to keep me safe”.