How Vehicle Design Affects Injuries

Motor vehicle crashes resulting in injuries and deaths are caused by poor driving and driver mistakes, unsafe roads, and unsafe vehicles. Driver mistakes have many causes, including drowsiness, inexperience, aggressiveness, alcohol and drugs, and distractions such as cellular phones, radios and arguments with others in the vehicle.

Poor driving and driver mistakes account for many vehicle accidents. A large population of drivers is guilty of “micro sleeping.” Micro sleeping is a period of time ranging from seconds to minutes when a person loses attention during a monotonous task, such as driving or watching a security monitor screen. It occurs when a person is fatigued or severely deprived of sleep and fighting to stay awake. While a person is micro sleeping, their eyes are often open and they may experience head snapping. Micro sleeping causes approximately 25% of serious crashes because the person failed to obey a traffic device or failed to stay in their proper lane of traffic, yet often people have no knowledge that they were micro sleeping.

Unsafe roads are also responsible for auto accidents. Rural roads, including non-interstate highways are not well designed. They are often narrow, unlighted and poorly signed, shoulders may be inadequate or completely missing. With development and progress, rural areas become increasingly suburban. Traffic often exceeds road design expectations. There is limited law enforcement to monitor and stop excessive speeding and emergency medical services are remote.

Lastly, unsafe vehicles account for many of the car accidents. The mass of vehicles continues to be reduced in order to increase fuel efficiency. The structural designs of vehicles can be improved such that the front frame should be designed to uniformly distribute the force of a collision with another vehicle. A study of actual road accidents, together with laboratory test crashes, provides guidance for safer vehicle design and fewer injuries in car accidents. For more information, See “Vehicle Design And The Physics of Traffic Safety.”