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I'm excited. If you have been alive a substantial amount of time you are easily running a lifetime average of about 1-2% chance of dying in a car accident in y
by edoo 8y ago
I'm excited. If you have been alive a substantial amount of time you are easily running a lifetime average of about 1-2% chance of dying in a car accident in your lifetime. Things have gotten much safer the past couple decades so that number is somewhere around 0.75% or lower now. I want to say being injured in a car accident is somewhere around 20-30% lifetime chance. Cars are incredibly dangerous and this will save a ton of lives.
- dsfyu404ed 8y ago>ings have gotten much safer the past couple decades so that number is somewhere around 0.75% or lower now. On a statistical level, sure. On an individual level you can improve your person chance for survival greatly by not driving drunk and putting down your phone, the shitposting can wait. Also if you've made it past your teens your odds improve greatly. >I want to say being injured in a car accident is somewhere around 20-30% lifetime chance. That sounds absurdly high. 25% is 1 in 4. Assuming odds were equal or higher in the past then the average person has one grandparent that's been injured in a car crash. Whatever the rates for injury/death are they're probably not evenly distributed among the population.
- edoo 8y agoWow so 4.6 million people seriously injured in car accidents in the US in 2016. Given an 80 year average lifespan you are statistically at 110% risk of serious lifetime injury using the most basic statistics. 4.6M / 330M = yearly risk 1.39% x80 years = 111.5% chance of serious injury I'm sure that includes things like whiplash though.
- papa_bear 8y agoProbably more correct to do one minus the chance of no injuries. So the chance of no injury is (1 - 0.0139) ^ 80 = 32.6%, making the chance of serious injury 67.4% over 80 years.
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- grandmczeb 8y agoThat’s not how probability works - the probability of getting heads when you flip a coin twice is not 2x50 = 100%.
- Rebelgecko 8y agoDoesn't pretty much any crash at a decent speed (even if the airbag doesn't go off) cause an injury like a bruise from the seatbelt or temporary sore muscles?
- dsfyu404ed 8y agoYeah, but so does closing a door on your hand. I would hope that whatever we're considering an "injury" is something severe enough to usually require medical treatment (kind of like when someone say "mass shooting" you don't usually think of a double murder suicide). Bruising except in the most extreme cases does not require treatment. Similarly for whiplash, if it's less severe than having a stiff neck in the morning like many people get from sleeping on a crappy air mattress or couch bed I wouldn't count it I think that including such minor injuries is misleading. Whatever we count as an "injury" should probably be more severe than the little mishaps we have with our bodies from going through life.
- dsfyu404ed 8y ago>Whatever we count as an "injury" should probably be more severe than the little mishaps we have with our bodies from going through life. The fact that this is apparently an unacceptable opinion here is mind boggling to me If we're basing out stats on unimportant injuries (minor bruises and stiff necks that go away in a day) then we're measuring something that we don't care about, injuries that do not meaningfully affect people. What we should care about is injuries that have appreciable recovery time (serious bruising, having a sore neck for multiple days, etc, etc) because those negatively affect people enough to be worth caring about. If we're including injuries we don't really care about in our numbers then something is wrong with our numbers. I dare someone to actually tell me why you think we should not distinguish injuries that are so minor as to not appreciably affect people from those that do seriously affect people. Tracking minor and significant injuries in the same category misleads anyone who has to reason about or make decisions based on those statistics.
- bubbleRefuge 8y agoWondering if those numbers contain a bit of an ambulance chaser skew in there?
- jfoster 8y agoI doubt it. Among people I know, I've known 3 people injured as pedestrians, one person who was killed as a pedestrian, and a couple of months ago I was injured as a pedestrian. Cars are ridiculously dangerous. Something needs to be done about it. Good thing there's Waymo and other companies like them.
- taneq 8y agoHoly crap, where do you live, just outside Thunderdome?
- jfoster 8y agoOne injury & the friend who passed away were in Sydney. Another friend was injured crossing the road in Bangkok. I was hit by a taxi whilst crossing the road (legally, with a walk light) in Singapore. In my experience, humans on average are just quite bad at paying attention. The only reason autonomous vehicles didn't surpass our driving abilities years ago is because we tend to make our roads unpredictable (road work, human behaviours, etc.) and it turns out that humans are able to quickly comprehend those situations.
- sien 8y agoSo, oddly enough you do sort of live outside the Thunderdome presuming you're in Sydney.
- n1231231231234 8y agoActually, OP's figures are pretty much backed up by the figures you get when googling this question. Chances to die of a car crash/ any kind of vehicle crash is about 1 in 100 according to here [0]. I can't find something similar straight away for injuries, but car accidents are ubiquitous and 2m people are injured every year (vs 30k fatalities) [1; cached]. So something above >20% seems plausible. [0]: https://www.iii.org/fact-statistic/facts-statistics-mortality-risk https://www.iii.org/fact-statistic/facts-statistics-mortalit... [1]: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:dnqo-l4y6-0J:https://www.forbes.com/sites/moneybuilder/2011/07/27/how-many-times-will-you-crash-your-car/%2Bchance+of+getting+injured+car+accident&hl=nl-DE&gbv=1&ct=clnk https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:dnqo-l...
- zwischenzug 8y agoSome UK figures here: https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2011/oct/28/mortality-statistics-causes-death-england-wales-2010 https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2011/oct/28/mortal... mortality due to transport accidents / total deaths = ~2000 / ~500000 ~= 1/250 or 0.4%
- artifactuality 8y ago> On an individual level you can improve your person chance for survival greatly by not driving drunk and putting down your phone Let me just add sleep-deprived driving to the mix
- sizzle 8y agoWhat about not driving late when bars are open or closing and people get behind the wheel tired and buzzed?
- sjg007 8y agoThis is true but there are also less people on the road.. That being said there are drunk drivers at anytime on the road.
- Obi_Juan_Kenobi 8y agoThe rates really are that high. Funny that you mention grandparents: if you graph the crash rate by age, you get a deep U-shape with the very youngest and oldest having a much higher rate.
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- extesy 8y agoI ride a motorcycle every day as my primary way of commuting to work. The only time in 10+ years I've been in a serious accident is when inattentive car driver rear-ended me on a highway. In his own words: "but I didn't see you". In the bright daylight. I was wearing hi-viz jacket. So I am super excited about any substantial progress in self-driving cars deployment.
- cheeze 8y agoFun fact, you're ~25 times more likely to die on a motorcycle mile for mile than a car. Stay safe out there.
- jfoster 8y agoI wonder how it breaks down for motorcycles. Some part of the danger is because you're vulnerable and you're riding among big metal objects (cars). Another part of the stats would be explained by dangerous riding (speeding and such). The other part would be that motorcycles are just quite dangerous by themselves given that there's no crumple zones or shielding when you're on a bike. Autonomous vehicles should eventually result in cyclists and motorcyclists being safer, but perhaps not completely.
- phinnaeus 8y agoStability is another huge concern for motorcycles. If you lose traction on just one of your wheels, you could crash. While losing traction on 2 or maybe even 3 wheels in a car is much easier to recover.
- Gustomaximus 8y agoBefore I went for a motorbike licence I research some of these stats. - A decent proportion of accidents are on unregistered bikes or riding while drinking. - Speeding, as always - A big risk factor is older people returning to motorbike riding as they remember their old skills but dont have them any more. - Having ABS is something like a 30% accident reduction. There's still a bunch of risk on a bike but for someone sensible you can improve your odds a fair way. Though I guess you could argue that personality would likely have well reduced odd than average in a car too so its still a relative increase...
- sizzle 8y agoWhat if you're in the car that the self driving algorithm decides it's safer to crash and kill you than hit whatever it thinks it was going to collide with? Edit- downvoters please state your beliefs, there is no right or wrong answer to points 1-7 below. [1] Imagine you’re in a self-driving car going down a road when, suddenly, the large propane tanks hauled by the truck in front of you fall out and fly in your direction. A split-second decision needs to be made, and you can't think through the outcomes and tradeoffs for every possible response. Fortunately, the smart system driving your car can run through tons of scenarios at lightning fast speed. How, then, should it determine moral priority? Consider the following possibilities: 1. Your car should stay in its lane and absorbs the damage, thereby making it likely that you’ll die. 2. Your car should save your life by swerving into the left lane and hitting the car there, sending the passengers to their deaths—passengers known, according to their big data profiles, to have several small children. 3. Your car should save your life by swerving into the right lane and hit the car there, sending the lone passenger to her death—a passenger known, according to her big data profile, to be a scientist who is coming close to finding a cure for cancer. 4. Your car should save the lives worth the most, measured according to amount of money paid into a new form of life assurance insurance. Assume that each person in a vehicle could purchase insurance against these types of rare but inevitable accidents, and then, smart cars would prioritize based on their ability and willingness to pay. 5. Your car should save your life and embrace a neutrality principle in deciding among the means for doing so, perhaps by flipping a simulated coin and swerving to the right if heads comes up and swerving to the left if its tails. 6. Your car shouldn’t prioritize your life and should embrace a neutrality principle by randomly choosing among the three options. 7. Your car should execute whatever option most closely matches your personal value system and the moral choices you would have made if you were capable of doing so. Assume that when you first purchased your car, you took a self-driving car morality test consisting of a battery of scenarios like this one and that the results “programmed” your vehicle. There’s no value-free way to determine what the autonomous car should do. The choice presented by options 1–7 shouldn’t be seen as a computational problem that can be “solved” by big data, sophisticated algorithms, machine learning, or any form of artificial intelligence. These tools can help evaluate and execute options, but ultimately, someone—some human beings—must choose and have their values baked into the software. Who should get decision-making power? Should it be politicians? The market? Insurance companies? Automotive executives? Technologists? Should consumers be allowed to customize the moral dashboard of their cars so that their vehicles execute moral decisions that are in line with their own preferences? 1. https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/j5a8d3/self-driving-car-policy-uber https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/j5a8d3/self-drivi...
- nradov 8y agoPerhaps, but as of yet there is no real evidence that self-driving cars will decrease the total number of deaths. In the short term, the latest advanced driver assistance systems which do things like automatic braking are proven to work. We should be putting a greater focus on deploying those more widely by making them mandatory on new passenger vehicles, just like air bags and stability control. Research into autonomous vehicles is great and might eventually pay off, but let's not get distracted from real incremental improvements that are possible today.
- simonebrunozzi 8y agoTo your point, ~3 years ago I didn't die in a car accident by literally a few inches. I'm with you - car safety is so important.
- robotresearcher 8y agoI don’t die in a car accident every day by a few inches. I’m totally serious. This is true for most every car trip. You trust yourself and the idiot in the other lane with your life every single day. It’s amazing how well cars protect us these days when we crash them. I’m excited about having them avoid the crashes.
- ben_w 8y agoI suspect you’re both writing about different inches. For my own example I offer an experience from my teenage years where a bus passed me with only one inch to spare from scraping that handlebar while on my other side there was an uneven slatted wooden fence with 1-1.5 inches to spare before it hit that handlebar. (Bicycle, not motor).
- simonebrunozzi 8y agoYes, we are. I was referring to a really scary (and very rare) occurrence.
- robotresearcher 8y agoI understand that but was pointing out how close to doom we are very frequently in traffic. Cars avoid head on collisions by single digit feet at relative speeds of 100kph, controlled by barely-trained, tired and distracted people and this is totally normal. Get just a bit closer and it’s totally terrifying.
- ben_w 8y agoSingle digits feet is normal. When I wrote “one inch” I wasn’t exaggerating.
- the_clarence 8y agoI find it just insane that it is socially accepted and normal to walk besides cars, cross in front of them, etc. They are killing machines driven by idiots with low IQs. Why do I need to put my life in their hands every single day?
- mikejb 8y ago> They are killing machines driven by idiots with low IQs. You don't have to go that far. Smart people drive cars and they fuck up just as much. We (humans) just suck generally at that task, and with more and more assistive features coming in, the attention paid to driving is going down even more.
- sowbug 8y agoThey were grandfathered. It's hard to imagine how cars could be introduced into the world today as a new invention that kills a million perfectly healthy people each year.
- djsumdog 8y agoThat's the classic John Stossle argument he made in the 90s with natural gas. I dunno. There is a huge risk with driverless cars. I'm still questioning the tech. This is an incredibly hard problem and edge cases mean people die. This is one technology I won't be an early adopter of.
- piker 8y ago> This is one technology I won't be an early adopter of. Oh, but you will.
- mulletbum 8y agoI just paint it like this: If you made a teleportation system where you could step in and come out the other end anywhere in the world, but there is a 1 in 1000 chance you step in and turn to green goo on the other end, should we still adopt it? You basically save millions of lives, but people have seem to come to the notion that they protect their own fate when in a car (which is 100% untrue). You may be able to mitigate some accidents, but getting T-boned at an intersection when you have a green light, but no visibility, is possible every single day. Your wheel bearing could blow out on the highway and send you rolling into a ditch. A deer could step out in front of you and go through your windshield and kill you. You have no ability to save yourself other than praying.
- a_imho 8y agoRoad safety is a regulation problem first and foremost, we could have safer roads today if we cared. Also, less cars are needed on the roads, not more and especially not driverless ones.
- notahacker 8y agoYep. There is substantial evidence to suggest that better road design stricter driving standards enforcement changes lives. There is no evidence other than exponential curve worship to believe that driverless cars on the existing road network will ever be less lethal than the surprisingly high benchmark for sober drivers, and plenty of reason to believe they will increase car use. Waymo demonstrating their cars are surprisingly competent and less aggressive than human road users is very different from demonstrating their AI is smart enough to make a fatal errors less frequently than every half billion miles in real world driving conditions.
- tim333 8y agoPeople do care and the roads are getting safer but it's a gradual process and has limits.