This couple says their car saved their life.
I drive ten hours each weekend. That gives me a great amount of time to wonder about things like: Do trees fart?
I regularly mention the time I hit an elk. For the foreseeable future, Mom will live in elk country, and I will visit her regularly.
When I was not busy counting semis with Trailer Tails (I saw eleven in three hours!) I wondered if automatic braking would help against an elk. I never saw mine. I definitely did not have time to react, but I braking half a second before I can could give me a fighting chance.
According to
this, my Accord can go 60 - 0 in 135 feet. Since an object travels 88 feet in one second at 60 MPH, it can stop in perhaps three seconds, so if it braked for half a second before hitting an elk, I might hit it at 50 MPH, instead of 60.
I did not feel there would be many statistics on times people braked really hard. This is what I was able to pull together:
"Over 1,700 people were killed and 500,000 injured in rear end crashes 2012, according to a federal safety agency." "[C]onsumers want to be in the driver's seat when it comes to deciding on how they spend their safety dollars, and automakers agree."
Automatic braking shouldn't just be for the rich - Jun. 9, 2015
"In 2012, one-third of all police-reported crashes involved a rear-end collision with another vehicle as the first harmful event in the crash”
https://www.safercar.gov/Vehicle-Sho...nology/AEB/aeb
Quote:
When compared to SUVs that didn’t have collision avoidance technology, Volvo’s XC60 SUVs (equipped with City Safety) had:
33 percent fewer bodily injury claims
15 percent fewer property damage claims
20 percent fewer collision claims
And for Volvo’s S60 midsize sedans, City Safety resulted in claims reductions of:
18 percent for bodily injury
16 percent for property damage
9 percent for collision
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Do Automatic Braking Systems Save Lives?
That only applies to accidents at 30 MPH or lower, though.
Quote:
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The National Safety Council estimated that, in the first 6 months of 2015, there were approximately 18,630 motor-vehicle deaths, and almost 2.2 million injuries, costing approximately $152 billion (a figure that includes direct and indirect costs). To reduce the number of accidents on the road, 20 automakers have come together to make automatic emergency braking a standard feature in all new cars by 2022.
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Good news everyone! I should have automatic braking by 2035!
Those automakers are Audi, BMW, FCA US LLC, Ford, General Motors, Honda, Hyundai, Jaguar Land Rover, Kia, Maserati, Mazda, Mercedes-Benz, Mitsubishi Motors, Nissan, Porsche, Subaru, Tesla Motors Inc., Toyota, Volkswagen and Volvo Car USA.
Automatic braking in cars to be mandatory by 2022 | Public Health
The NHTSA estimates automatic braking will prevent 28,000 crashes and 12,000 injuries.
Strangely, people complain that twenty times as many people die from heat disease each year. What does that have to do with anything? Are engineers necessarily the right people to fight heart disease? What if someone rear-ends a critic, who then has a heart attack?
Why does football supposedly have more injuries than rugby, which does not have the protective equipment? Why are people allegedly more likely to hurt their back while wearing a weight belt? That last article points out that people felt concerned people would rely on seatbelts and airbags to keep them safe.
"The second highest cause of automobile crashes is rear end collisions – 17 percent."
Clay Gabler, professor of biomedical engineering at Virginia Tech, and Kristofer Kusano of Herndon, Va., a Ph.D. student in mechanical engineering, have published research in peer-reviewed journals, predicting that the use of three automatic braking systems may reduce serious injuries by 50 percent.
https://vtnews.vt.edu/articles/2012/...avoidance.html