We (automotive active safety engineers) don't look at it as a percentage-of-inept-drivers, but more like the Trolley Problem[1], that is, overall harm vs benefit. To put it another way: seatbelts, airbags, and heart surgery hurt/kill some people, but the benefit outweights that harm.
People's lives are being sacrificed now, teaching us how to build safer cars. Some large percentage of the time, seatbelts prevent death or reduce the injury. Some small percentage of the time, they induce further injury or death.
Do we stop using seatbelts until they are 100% effective? Was it a mistake to start putting seatbelts in cars before it could be proven that they absolutely wouldn't kill anyone?
I don’t know about seatbelts, but airbags, which are also mandatory (I believe) have been proven in certain cases to have actually caused more harm than good.
So much microfocus on the rare harm is losing the forest for the trees, particularly when the alternative is a mutating often deadly virus.
And how frequent are those situations compared to those where people accelerate too quickly and lose control of their car? That's like the argument that seatbelts are dangerous or lethal in some situations. Sure they are. But in all other situations they save lives and reduce injuries.
That's true of basically any change isn't it? Even seat belts conceivably could result in some very small increase in the chance of death as a result of it being harder to escape a vehicle. Obviously the benefits far outweigh the risk, but then we are just arguing over where to draw the line.
I think that this is the key argument fir the deaths caused. But, I was under the impression that the effectiveness of air bags compared to their hazards was coming into question in testing anyway. a seat belt saves many more lives than an airbag?
You absolutely can't challenge someone's personal experience with statistics, but something about this line of argument still troubles me.
I've lost a handful of close friends to car accidents. If survivorship grants standing, then I'm for doing almost anything to reduce the tens of thousands of US road deaths each year.
Survivors have been angry at safety tech before, but we generally ignore them. I've known people who insisted they would rather be thrown from an accident; they wouldn't wear a belt. One friend came to that conclusion because his uncle died trapped in a burning vehicle. I respect the incredibly complex and deep emotional reasons that he came to his conclusion, but he was still wrong, and he shouldn't set seatbelt policy.
ON THE OTHER HAND...
We sometimes throw around this baseline of the natural accident rate of drivers, and that's slightly lying with statistics. Accidents are not evenly distributed across all drivers.
You have a lot of impaired drivers in that pack. You have a bunch of insolvent, uninsurable drivers who cause a disproportionate share of accidents.
If the worst 10% have most of the accidents, then even a car that makes us safer than the mean driver could still make 90% of us less safe. We really want a car that makes us safer than our percentile of drivers.
Maybe driverless cars are already better than the mean. Are they better than the 90th %ile? I don't know that anyone has enough data to say.
The most cautious drivers really will have an at-fault accident rate statistically indistinguishable from zero. We should absolutely be shooting for that.
I think you missed their point. It's not that most situations are improved and some get worse, it's that those situations might be unevenly distributed among drivers.
A seat belt is basically the same for everyone. It makes things safer when you look at all drivers, and it makes things safer for just about any subgroup of drivers.
But a buggy AEB might not fit that pattern. Imagine a system that reduces crashes by half, but then adds an extra X crashes per million miles. If someone's unassisted crash rate is 5X, then this system reduces it to 3.5X and is a great help. If someone's unassisted crash rate is .5X, then this system increases their crash rate to 1.25X and is a terrible trade.
If a seatbelt makes you 50% safer in the event of a potentially fatal crash, you wouldn't say "it's really a 4% difference because 8% of the population is involved in a potentially fatal accident"
That is purposefully obfuscating the relevant data.
This is a completely speculative conjecture known as risk compensation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_compensation). It's often brought up in opposition of mandatory safety measures (quite prominently around seat belt legislation in the 1970s), but AFAIK it's never been shown to be numerically significant.
More Or Less, the BBC statistics/news podcast did a bit on this recently. It was very good.
They used the example of people wearing seatbelts. The vast majority of people injured in car accidents were wearing seatbelts. Because the vast vast vast majority of people in car wear seat belts.
its only worth discussing if you can prove it exists. you've just offered supposition, not fact.
the fact that safety features such as seatbelts and airbags save lives is undeniable. they didn't lead to uncanny valleys of complacency for anyone but drivers who chose to abuse those features with wreckless driving. the data for AP already indicates this trend will continue with ML drivers.
You are implying that the consequence of not wearing a seat belt and having an accident hurts only the idiot? That's not the case. There's a cost to society (we have to clean up the mess) and to the family (if any). It's incredibly selfish and irresponsible to take such completely pointless risks.
You just reminded me of the argument against seat belts based on the assumption that they'll encourage riskier driving thereby leading to more deaths.
Not doing the obviously correct superior easy strategy because there's some infrequent weird corner case prevents any kind of progress. Perfection is the enemy of good enough, engineering is balancing constraints, ad nauseum...
> This must once have been true of seatbelts too, before all the experiments that were done with dummies and cadavers.
Surprisingly enough, it was true of airbags after those experiments too: in the late '80s and early '90s, it was noticed that the airbag fatality rate was shockingly high compared to what had been projected, so they went back to the drawing boards and revised the designs. A quote from a RAND study on autonomous cars:
> This tension produced "a standoff between airbag proponents and the automakers that resulted in contentious debates, several court cases, and very few airbags" (Wetmore, 2004, p. 391). In 1984, the US DOT passed a ruling requiring vehicles manufactured after 1990 to be equipped with some type of passive restraint system (e.g., air bags or automatic seat belts) (Wetmore, 2004); in 1991, this regulation was amended to require air bags in particular in all automobiles by 1999 (Pub. L. No. 102-240). The mandatory performance standards in the FMVSS further required air bags to protect an unbelted adult male passenger in a head-on, 30 mph crash. Additionally, by 1990, the situation had changed dramatically, and air bags were being installed in millions of cars. Wetmore attributes this development to three factors: First, technology had advanced to enable air-bag deployment with high reliability; second, public attitude shifted, and safety features became important factors for consumers; and, third, air bags were no longer being promoted as replacements but as supplements to seat belts, which resulted in a sharing of responsibility between manufacturers and passengers and lessened manufacturers' potential liability (Wetmore, 2004). While air bags have certainly saved many lives, they have not lived up to original expectations: In 1977, NHTSA estimated that air bags would save on the order of 9,000 lives per year and based its regulations on these expectations (Thompson, Segui-Gomez, and Graham, 2002). Today, by contrast, NHTSA calculates that air bags saved 8,369 lives in the 14 years between 1987 and 2001 (Glassbrenner, undated). Simultaneously, however, it has become evident that air bags pose a risk to many passengers, particularly smaller passengers, such as women of small stature, the elderly, and children. NHTSA (2008a) determined that 291 deaths were caused by air bags between 1990 and July 2008, primarily due to the extreme force that is necessary to meet the performance standard of protecting the unbelted adult male passenger. Houston and Richardson (2000) describe the strong reaction to these losses and a backlash against air bags, despite their benefits. The unintended consequences of air bags have led to technology developments and changes to standards and regulations. Between 1997 and 2000, NHTSA developed a number of interim solutions designed to reduce the risks of air bags, including on-off switches and deployment with less force (Ho, 2006). Simultaneously, safer air bags, called advanced air bags, were developed that deploy with a force tailored to the occupant by taking into account the seat position, belt usage, occupant weight, and other factors. In 2000, NHTSA mandated that the introduction of these advanced air bags begin in 2003 and that, by 2006, every new passenger vehicle would include these safety measures (NHTSA, 2000).
[1] www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem
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