How Vehicle Safety Has Improved

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History of Auto Safety

To best understand how automobile safety technology has changed over the years, here's a look back at the history of auto safety. When the horseless carriage first appeared in significant numbers around 1903, the only safety feature was a horn to let people know that you were coming down the road and to get out of the way. Inventor Miller Reese Hutchinson patented the Klaxon Horn for car use in 1908.

Early cars such as the Ford Model T had a top speed of 40 to 45 miles per hour. Naturally, as more cars began to appear on city streets and America began to build highways for vehicle travel, performance and speed increased and so did traffic collisions, thus the need for better safety measures. Academic studies soon found the need for car seat belts and padded dashboards.
General Motors began doing crash testing in the 1930s and this led to the creation of what has become known as a "crumple zone" in which the front of a car is designed to collapse in on itself to absorb energy in the event of a front-end collision. Crash tests led to the use of "crash test dummies" to gauge auto safety after an impact.

In 1953 the Colorado State Medical Society supported putting lap belts in all vehicles. In 1955 California became the first state to require all new cars to come with mandatory lap belts. Congress passed a law requiring all new cars comply with certain safety measures and by 1965 all states require seat belts to be installed. The Highway Safety Act was passed in 1966, creating the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). Even with increased Federal regulation, less than fifteen percent of Americans used seat belts back then.
The NHTSA sets safety standards and created the New Car Assessment Program (NCAP) which expanded in 1993 to include its Five Star Safety Rating. According to the NHTSA, the use of the three-point seat belt restraint system, protecting passengers across the lap and shoulder, "that includes a pretensioner that prevents excess slack during a crash" has saved hundreds of thousands of lives.

Modern Auto Safety

America became a nation on wheels and by the 1970s the Department of Transportation reported that 47.7 percent of American homes had at least one car and 29.3 percent had two or more cars. Automakers were under a lot of pressure to design safer vehicles, which led to the advent of airbags in cars which deploy automatically during a collision. The airbag provides an energy-absorbing surface, and many modern cars include ten or more airbags including driver, passenger, side-curtain, seat-mounted, door-mounted and pillar-mounted bags, even knee bolters. According to the NHTSA, frontal airbags alone have saved over 50,000 lives.
Driver Assistance
Seat belt and airbag protection has led us to computer assisted technologies such as anti-lock brakes which provide better stability when braking, especially in wet conditions. Traction control detects when a loss of traction occurs and cuts down power to the wheel that is slipping. This has led to what is known today as Driver Assist Tech.

Human Error

Today's cars are literally watching and sensing the road around you and provide feedback to help further prevent accidents. Our vehicles can now create a virtual bubble of safety around you, watching out for other vehicles and even pedestrians, to reduce accidents. Today's driver assistance features include back up cameras, blind-spot monitoring, adaptive cruise control, forward collision warning, rear cross traffic warning, lane departure warning, lane-keep assist and automatic emergency braking.

Modern cars alert drivers to sudden speed changes and even brake the vehicle to avoid an accident. When combined, driver assist technology saves lives. The NHTSA tells us that in 2022, "42,515 people died in motor vehicle crashes and many of these were tied to human error."

Safe Technology

When buying a new car, it is important to know what safety technology is included. Various manufacturers use different names for these technologies. Some of these features are designed to alert the driver of an impending collision while other systems actually take over and apply the brakes or move the steering wheel to get you back in your lane and avoid an accident. Before buying a car, make sure to research the various safety features that are included to better protect yourself and your passengers.

Every time you get into a car today, a complex web of computers, video cameras, sensors of various kinds, even lidar, is working to help make you a better driver. Some cars will step in to stop the vehicle if a pedestrian is in the way, reducing rear end crashes by 50 percent. Some cars have video cameras front and rear as well as under the side mirrors to recognize lanes, cars, and more. Sensors include sonar, ultrasonic and radar to send out waves that tell the car's computers the distance from various objects and keeps the distance between you and the vehicle in front of you constant.
Other sensors inside the car monitor your steering to make sure your hands are on the wheel while laser arrays monitor your face to make sure you are paying attention while driving. The next step is true hands-free driving. That's where lidar comes in.

Lidar stands for Light Detection and Ranging. It is basically remote sensing in a laser array that measures distances and constructs 3D maps of the environment around the car. Laser pulses determine the elapsed time when reflecting off objects and returning information to the sensor. Thus, it tracks objects to maintain safe distances. It can identify road signs, traffic signals, and road markings for real-time hazard analysis. It is a major step in creating true autonomous vehicles.

Safety Tech is Lowering Accident Rates

Statistically speaking, according to the National Safety Council, cars in 2012, before the advent of much of the driver assist technology we enjoy today, had an estimated 56 percent lower fatality risk than the average vehicle back in the late 1950s. According to NHTSA statistics, automobile safety features saved 115 lives in 1960 and by 2012 saved 27,621 per year. Altogether, improved safety technology has saved over 600,000 lives between 1960 and 2012.
According to the NSC, to date, Advanced Driver Assist Systems (ADAS) alone has prevented a further estimated 20,841 deaths per year, or approximately 62 percent of total traffic deaths per year. ADAS technology also potentially prevents 1.69 million injuries which amounts to 60 percent of total traffic injuries. The majority of these injuries is achieved through the use of forward collision prevention and lane keep assist.

ADAS technology is estimated to prevent damage to up to 4.60 million vehicles per year. Here in America, the NHTSA estimates that human error is a factor in 94 percent of all crashes. Imagine how many lives might be saved once our cars start doing the driving for us.