Car Crashes

Car crashes, they happen all over the world. So what causes these car crashes? What are car companies doing to avoid them? How does alcohol influence people’s ability to drive? These are all questions I have asked myself. So why do car crashes happen?

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In order to answer this question, we should know how car crashes happen. The number one cause of car crashes is not drunk drivers, speeding, or running red lights but by the number of distracted drivers. In 2013, three thousand one hundred and fifty people died in distraction-related car crashes and 42,000 people were injured. In 2016 263 drivers ages 16-19 were involved in distraction related fatal crashes in the U.S.Why teens ages 16 - 19? The reason is teens of this age group are usually the ones who are involved in distraction related crashes because the parts of their brain that control their decision making is not fully developed until early adulthood. Therefore they are more likely to crash.

Now that we know what causes the most car crashes we can move onto which distractions caused the crashes and how we can avoid them. To begin with, we can all be off our phones while we drive. Even if we are just talking on the phone, or using voice to text, the part of our brain that should be focusing on not crashing the car is instead focusing on talking on the phone, or thinking about what we're going to text.

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The more advanced technology gets, the more car companies build that tech into our cars. The way most companies are starting to make self driving cars is by using cameras, LIDAR and radar. What if the cameras get foggy? What happens if the LIDAR laser is broken? What if the radar stops working? What if all of these things happen at once? Then what are we supposed to do? Even though there are upsides to self-driving cars there are still disadvantages too.

Now the third step of figuring out why crashes happen.Alcohol. I have wondered for a long time why alcohol affects people's driving. It turns out that the alcohol slows down the neural connections in your brain. Alcohol also affects the amount of oxygen in your blood. This is called oxygen deprivation or hypoxia.Hypoxia usually starts with the inability to perform normal physical activities, such as climbing a short flight of stairs without fatigue or driving your car. There are other symptoms that come with hypoxia such as lack of appetite, vomiting, headache, distorted vision, and fatigue.

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Now how many people die from car crashes each year? Well in 2015 five thousand three hundred and sixty seven pedestrians were hit and killed either by the hit or later from injuries. Each year there are fewer deaths and fewer injuries. With the exception of 2007, there were still fewer deaths but there were 9,000 more injuries.So why are the numbers less each year? Well, car companies are using more and more technology to create a wider and more accurate system for detecting other cars and pedestrians. With this new technology fewer and fewer people are hit by cars. Although this helps in some ways it is also not helpful because the tech teaches us to rely on that teach but like I said earlier what happens if we are taking a nap in a self driving car then the LIDAR and radars die and the car crashes? Would the person in the car die because they weren't paying attention? Or what if during your nap the car is forced to make decision that isn’t in its programing? Or that only human brains can think logically enough to solve?

After learning about these crashes what can we take away? Well for starters we can be more aware of the effects alcohol has on us. We also know that the cause of most crashes is distraction related and the most common distraction is our phones so we should stay off of them while we are driving. Thirdly we learned why it is that teenagers ages 16-19 make such bad decisions about driving.