Recently in Car Accident Category

Today came news that a prototype robot-driven car, developed by Google, was at fault in a car accident near Google’s Mountain View, CA headquarters. Google’s engineers, for their part, claim that a human driver who overrode the robotic autopilot was at fault in the accident, rather than the software that normally drives the vehicle. Robotically-driven [...]

We’ve blogged the work of Tom Vanderbilt before — most recently in our post, “Don’t Drive With A Divorced Doctor In A Pick-Up Truck On Super Bowl Sunday” — and we’re fans of his blog howwedrive.com. Vanderbilt’s latest is a thought-provoking Slate essay entitled “Little, Yellow, Dangerous: Children At Play Signs Endanger Our Kids.” As [...]

We’ve discussed the Peltzman effect before on this blog. The “Peltzman effect” describes a supposed phenomenon wherein the utility of new safety devices – like seat belts in cars – is offset by the new risks that it encourages people to take. Put seatbelts in cars, the thinking goes, and it will just encourage people [...]

NHTSA just announced the number of US traffic deaths for 2010 and it was staggeringly low – 32,788. There are fewer traffic deaths now than there were in 1949, despite the fact that we drive a lot more. In fact, we drove 28.5 billion more miles in 2010 than we did in 2009, when deaths [...]