Miles from home |
Percentage of accidents |
1 mile or less |
23% |
2 to 5 miles |
29% |
6 to 10 miles |
17% |
11 to 15 miles |
8% |
16 to 20 miles |
6% |
More than 20 miles |
17% |
In addition:
- Accidents were more than twice as likely to occur one mile from home compared to 20 miles from home
- One percent of reported accidents took place 50 miles or more from home
- The region with the highest percentage of reported accidents occurring less than five miles from home was the Northeast, followed by the Midwest, West, Great Plains, Gulf, then Mid Atlantic
The editors at Edmunds.com have put together their top ten list of things to do to avoid an accident.
article content Top 10 Editors' Tips to Prevent a Car Accident
From Edmunds.com
As automotive journalists, we at Edmunds.com tend to be a little more practiced on the road than the average driver. Not only is driving cars our job but we're required to go to high-performance driving school every year "for insurance purposes." So take it from us when we say we know a thing or two about how to avoid a car accident. We're not talking about obvious tips your mom told you, like, "Look both ways before you enter an intersection" or "Don't tailgate. "Rather, tips we've picked up in the field, interacting with L.A. drivers in particular, driving cross-country, and testing cars on the track.
1. Avoid the "fast lane." By using the center or right lane on multilane roads, you have more "escape routes" should a problem suddenly arise that requires you to quickly change lanes or pull onto the shoulder. Most highway accidents occur in the left lane. Furthermore, you are more conspicuous to highway patrol if you are in the "fast lane."
2. Keep your eyes scanning the area ahead. Don't just eyeball the car in front of you but watch the traffic in front of that car as well. This increases your chance of seeing a problem while still having enough time to react to it, and decreases your chance of rear-ending the vehicle in front of you should they make a sudden stop.
3. Beware of blind spots. Yes, adjust your side mirrors and rearview mirror to provide you with one near seamless panoramic scene of the view behind you, but don't rely solely on them. Actually turn to look directly into the lanes beside you to avoid missing something left undetected by your mirrors. Also consider the blind spots for other drivers around you, especially truckers, and try to minimize the amount of time you spend in them.
4. Drive with your hands in the 9 and 3 o'clock position. Instead of the lazy, typical way people drive with one hand at 12 o'clock or both hands resting at the bottom of the steering wheel, this recommended position facilitates maximum vehicle control when you're forced into quick maneuvering to avoid a potential car accident.
5. Get racecar driver control of the wheel. Another trick to maintain control of the wheel is to move your seat close enough to the steering wheel so that your wrist can rest on the top of the wheel with your arm outstretched and your back against the seat. This not only ensures your arms won't easily fatigue but they'll be in the optimum position for some last-minute evasive maneuvers.
6. Judge a driver by his/her car's condition. If a car's condition indicates an inattentive owner because of body damage or dirty windows, it could easily suggest an inattentive driver, too. Also, drifting in the lane often identifies a tired, drunk or cell phone-preoccupied driver — so you should get away from that person.
7. Know your car's limits. After getting behind the wheel of everything from minivans to exotic sport cars, our editors know the performance limits of the cars they drive. Pay attention to how your particular vehicle reacts in certain situations — if the vehicle leans a lot when you're rounding corners, this means that wrenching the wheel at high speeds to avoid an accident will be a scary proposition. It's also key to be familiar with the limits of your car's brakes and tires. How long does it take to stop when you apply maximum pressure? How much grip do your tires have? If you replaced your car's stock tires with a cheap set, chances are you've reduced its braking and handling capability.
8. Keep your car in good shape. At Edmunds, we stick to the manufacturer's recommended maintenance schedule for our long-term cars. This ensures that they'll accelerate, stop and steer when we need them to. Reconsider the wisdom of "getting another 1,000 miles out of old tires" — if you encounter an unexpectedly slick road, you may find yourself rubbing up against the guard rail.
9. The nighttime is not the right time. Some people like to travel at night to avoid traffic, but with it comes certain hazards. In addition to your own increased fatigue and decreased field of vision, you need to be aware of joyriding teens and drivers who may be tired or drunk. Drive extra defensively around the witching hour, after midnight when some people are leaving bars, parties or sports arenas. And for goodness' sake, don't drive down a dark road with burned out headlights or taillights.
10. Learn how to drive a racecar. It may sound like a frivolous expense, but going to a high-performance driving school is one of the best ways to improve your skill as a driver. Here you'll learn what it feels like to drive a car "at the limits" and have an opportunity to practice accident avoidance maneuvers and skid recovery in a safe, controlled environment. Understanding how to make your car do what you want it to do in emergency situations could save your life.
None of these are surefire ways to prevent a car accident. You can only control what you do behind the wheel, not what your fellow drivers do. But take responsibility when you drive and focus on the task at hand. It's not a time to return phone calls or shave or log onto your e-mail. Take it from our editors: Driving isn't a mindless activity, it's an exercise in self-restraint, self-defense and self-preservation.
Copyright Edmunds Inc. The original article "Top 10 Editors' Tips to Prevent a Car Accident" is an Edmunds.com "Safety Tip" and is republished here with permission.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) reports that driving distractions are to blame for about 4,300 crashes every day on U.S. roads.
According to the NHTSA, motor vehicle traffic crashes continued to be the leading cause of death for 21-34 year olds in 2003 with a total of 10,987 deaths. For those aged 35-44, traffic accidents drop to the third leading cause behind cancer and heart disease. For 46-66 year olds, traffic accidents drop to the eigth cause and for those 65 and older, traffic accidents no longer rank as one of the top ten causes of death.
The two most important things you can do to prevent an accident is drive defensively (like you own your car, not the road) and always wear your lap and shoulder restraints. Even if you are just running to the local mini mart.
According to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, your risk of a crash increases four fold when talking on a cellular phone. Attempting to distribute your attention to both driving and keeping up with the conversation may cause you to miss an important cue that otherwise would have reduced your response time. It's called sensory overload.
Fighter pilots during the Viet Nam war began to receive so much information from their plane during combat (warning lights, radar and missile lock ons along with their standard instrumentation) they simply could not pay attention to everything. The result was aircraft designed to be much more simple. Automobile drivers are dangerously near that same scenario as our instumentation, other drivers, road hazards, GPS voices and telephone conversations compete for our attention.
It's time to put down the cellular or pull over to a safe location to hold the conversation.
The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety has just released their top safety picks for 2008.
| LARGE CARS Audi A6 Cadillac CTS Ford Taurus1 Mercury Sable1 Volvo S80 MIDSIZE CARS Audi A3 Audi A4 Honda Accord 4-door models Saab 9-3 Subaru Legacy1 MIDSIZE CONVERTIBLES Saab 9-3 Volvo C70 SMALL CAR Subaru Impreza1 MINI VANS Honda Odyssey Hyundai Entourage Kia Sedona | MID SIZED SUVS Acura MDX Acura RDX BMW X3 BMW X5 Ford Edge Ford Taurus X Honda Pilot Hyundai Santa Fe Hyundai Veracruz built after August 2007 Infiniti EX35 Lincoln MKX Mercedes M class Nissan Murano Saturn VUE built after December 2007 Subaru Tribeca Toyota Highlander Volvo XC90 SMALL SUVS Honda CR-V Honda Element Subaru Forester1 LARGE PICKUP Toyota Tundra |
1 with optional electronic stability control
Think ahead:
If you see a vehicle parked on the shoulder of the road, move to the left lane if it is safe to do so or slow down. Assume the driver will step out of the vehicle at the moment you pass them or attempt to re-enter the roadway just as you reach them. A vehicle traveling at 55 miles per hour travels 161 feet in two seconds. Reducing your speed by just 5 miles an hour means you reduce the distance you travel in two seconds by 14 feet. That's often enough distance to avoid a collision if you are paying attention and thinking ahead.
Ask yourself three questions when you approach a vehicle on the shoulder.
- Is the driver in the driver seat?
- Is there exhaust coming from the car? (indicating the engine is running)
- Are the front wheels turned to the left?
The same is true of on ramps. You may have the right-of-way but merging traffic may not see you or the other driver may be distracted or just having a bad day. Whatever the case, give them some extra room so everyone stays safe.
Light and Wipe:
Some states, such as Illinois, have adopted a law that requires the use of headlights any time your windshield wipers are on. We think that is a great idea. Headlights don't just provide you with visibility, they allow other drivers to see you. Driving with your headlights on in the rain improves everyone's visibility and that's a good thing.
Fog: The world around us changes substantially when we encounter fog and those changes often go unnoticed. Oh sure, it's harder to see in fog but there are other dynamics at work that drivers simply are not aware of. Let's take a look at some of those factors so we can be safer drivers.
We see objects based on the brightness of the object and its background. It's called contrast. A flashlight on a dark night is easy to see because of the contrast between the flashlight and the dark back drop. Fog reduces that contrast and makes objects much fainter and less distinct. That's the first change.
The second dynamic is called backscatter. When the light from your headlights hit the tiny moisture droplets that create fog the water causes the light to scatter. Only a small portion of the light actually shines forward to light the roadway ahead. Some of the light is reflected back at you. That is called backscatter and it dramatically reduces your visibility. That is the reason you should never use your bright lights while driving in fog. That may sound counter intuitive but the brighter your headlights the more backscatter they create and the more difficult it is for you to see.
Fog lights, on the other hand, operate much differently than headlights. First, they are set much closer to the ground to reduce the amount of backscatter they create. Secondly, they are aimed down at the roadway instead of ahead so there is less backscatter. And third, their light pattern is much different than headlights. The diagram below illustrates the three points we just mentioned. It shows an overhead and side view of the same vehicle. You can see that the beam is below the headlights, projects a much shorter and wider beam for improved road visibility and is projected much lower to reduce backscatter.
PIAA.com
If you are purchasing after market fog lights, stay away from yellow or amber lights. One theory for amber lights is the blue portion of the light spectrum is more easily scattered. That simply isn't true given the size of the moisture droplets in fog. Both scatter about the same. The output of yellow lights is also less further reducing visibility.
Another dynamic that drivers seldom understand is perception of speed. In a "normal" world, we judge our relative speed by the objects we pass. Fence posts and telephone poles all provide us with a visual reference of how fast we are traveling down the road. When we encounter fog, those visual reference points are taken away. The result is drivers will often underestimate their speed. Slow down when you encounter fog and glance at your speedometer more often. You may be surprised to find that you are actually speeding up!!
Lower contrast means we have a more difficult time determining the difference between moving and stationary objects. Once you see the faint outline of a vehicle in front of you your assumption is it is moving and the reduced contrast does not provide you a clear visual reference that the vehicle is actually stopped until it is too late. Moreover, you don't expect a vehicle to be stopped in the middle of the roadway but the fact they have slammed into the car in front of them may only be realized after you do the same thing.
There is a little known phenomenon known as aerial perspective or atmospheric perspective. We won't go into a lot of detail but simply say that we see distant objects as being "fuzzy" while objects that are close are seen more sharply. Again, it has to do with contrast. In fog, we see just about everything as "fuzzy" so our sense of distance is greatly distorted and we think objects are farther away than they actually are.
Finally, there is a dynamic called the Mandelbaum Effect. The short explanation says that our eyes won't sharply focus on distant objects like it does on close objects. Fog confuses our brain and reduces our sharp focus to just a few feet so objects further down the road are actually seen much less sharply. It is a physiological effect that all of us experience.
Similar dynamics happen in rain and snow but are more pronounced in fog. When you encounter fog, rain or snow, slow down, make certain your lights are on, use fog lights if you have them or low beams if you do not have fog lights and be prepared to stop.
Emergency Vehicles:
Always move to the left lane if it is safe to do so or slow down when approaching emergency vehicles or state maintenance vehicles. In the course of doing their job, they may have a momentary lapse in judgement and step in front of your vehicle without thinking. It's so easy to do.
The Cost of Fuel:
With skyrocketing gasoline prices continuing to soar, there are some things you can do to reduce your out of pocket expenses.
Look for the cheapest gas price in town. Web sites such as gasbuddy.com or Gas Prices from MSN Auto can tell you where the lowest price for fuel is.
Look into special programs that offer lower fuel prices such as COSTCO or Kroger. You have to join COSTCO because only members can use their gas stations. Acquire a Kroger Plus card and you can save 10¢ per gallon at their gas stations. Sign up for their credit and you can save 15¢ per gallon. In both cases, you must purchase $100.00 worth of food per month. Look for similar deals through other retailers.
Here are some additional tips on reducing fuel costs:
- Avoid idling
- Check your tire pressure weekly (including your spare!)
- Use the lowest recommended octane for your car (check your owner's manual)
- Maintain your car. Better performance = reduced fuel consumption
- Drive at a consistent speed. Use your cruise control
- Slow down. A car traveling at 55 mph uses about 15% less fuel that one traveling at 65 mph
- Use your GPS. Shorter trips = reduced fuel consumption
- Anticipate lights. Slow down so the light turns green. You won't have to come to a complete stop.
- If you are considering a new car buy a gas miser. Some good choices for hybrids are the Toyota Prius, Honda Civic Hybrid or the Toyota Camry Hybrid. For a non-hybrid consider the Scion xB and the Honda Civic. The Toyota RAV4 4-cylinder is a good choice in SUVs.
You will see a lot of recommendations about turning off your air conditioner. The truth is it only uses about 1 mpg. Opening the windows, particularly at highway speeds, increases drag on the vehicle.
Let's talk about Ethanol 101 for a moment and then we'll discuss the E-10 and E85 fuels.
When automobiles first appeared on the scene, their gaoline engines were prone to something called engine knock (also called ping). Engine knock occurs when the spark plug ingites the fuel/air mixture inside the cylinder but the mixture does not burn efficiently. Instead, part of the mixture burns and part of it explodes. You want the mixture to burn at a precise point in the cylinder's cycle. The resulting knock or ping occurs before the cylinder has reached its desired placement and extensive pressures are created inside the cylinder. This is not a good thing on internal combustion engines. In essence, the engine is in the process of destroying itself. Since compression is not optimal, horsepower is lost and you wind up with an engine that is noisy and not very powerful. Such was life in the early 1900's.
America at that time had a strong farming economy and one thing we had a lot of was grain alcohol. Used for medicinal purposes I'm sure. In any case, that was good news for the fledgling auto industry because engines ran great on it. The higher octane increased compression, which improved horsepower and eliminated engine knock. Unfortunately, grain alcohol was too expensive to use as a primary fuel. Enter the Dayton Engineering Laboratories Company (We know them today as DELCO).
DELCO found that grain alcohol would boost the octane of gasoline and a blend of 30 percent alcohol and 70 percent gasoline was just about perfect. By the early 1920's, alcohol blends were a common fuel source. That would quickly change, however.
By 1921, a DELCO engineer named Thomas Midgley, under contract to General Motors, found that adding tetraethyl lead to gasoline worked just as well as grain alcohol at increasing the octane and eliminating engine knock. The best news was that it was much cheaper than grain alcohol. So General Motors partnered with DuPont, and Standard Oil to form the Ethyl Gasoline Company. Those of you that remember regular and ethyl gasoline now know where the name ethyl came from...tetraETHYL lead.
The nation drove around for the next thirty or so years spewing lead fumes into the atmosphere until Clair Patterson,a geochemist from the California Institute of Technology, figured out that atmospheric lead levels had increased since leaded gas was introduced in the 1920's. Today, we understand the use of glacial ice cores to determine what the atmosphere was like in times past but Patterson's work was pretty remarkable at the time. The findings eventually led to the Clean Air Act of 1970, which required auto makers to install catalytic converters. As it turns out, lead deposits gum up catalytic converters so leaded fuel can't be used in automobiles equipped with the devices. Leaded gas was finally banned in the U.S. in 1986.
Today, gasoline blended with grain alcohol is once again being added to boost octane in gaoline. What goes around comes around. Now you know.
Now for E-85 fuels:
As yet, we have not bought in to all the hype about E-85 fuels. There are several for reasons for that. Alcohol as a fuel additive has been around for a long time. As we said, it was used in the 1920s to prevent engine knock. But the truth about ethyl alcohol or ethanol is it generates less horsepower than gasoline. Less horsepower means less fuel economy or fewer miles per gallon. The result is you have to burn more fuel to go the same distance. That means you have to fill up more often and that means an increase in gasoline consumption, not a decrease. That doesn't make a lot of sense to us. Here's how it really works.CAFE Numbers:
Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards, which are set by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), establish the average fuel economy for an automaker's full fleet of vehicles. Currently, the minimum miles-per-gallon is 27.5 for cars and 21.6 for light trucks (2006 numbers). That means that an automaker must average 27.5 mpg for their entire fleet of cars from the worst gas guzzler to their most miserly model. But wait! Not so fast. It isn't that simple. Auto manufacturers are also granted fuel economy "credits" for every flexible fuel vehicle (called FFVs) they make. In short, the government rates FFVs at about 1 1/2 times the fuel economy they actually get. For example, a vehicle that is normally rated at 19 mpg would be rated at 28.5 mpg if it were equipped with a flexible fuel engine. That artificially inflates the CAFE numbers for the auto manufacturers.
The result has been that auto makers have equipped their larger vehicles, typically SUVs, with flexible fuel engines because they are popular and the credits artifically boost the MPG rating for those vehicles. Instead of actually saving gasoline, the move has increased consumption of gasoline by about 1 percent, or 1.2 billion gallons, according to a 2005 study by the Union of Concerned Scientists.
Our second concern is that E-85 cannot be used on all engines unlike E-10 or 10% ethanol fuels. It's also very difficult to find a service station that sells E-85. Those limitations mean E-85 may be a stronger competitor as more FFVs are manufactured but limits its practicality today.
E-85 is more environmentally friendly than gasoline but it still emits acetaldehyde, a probable carcinogen and ethanol, even E-10, is in short supply. In fact, we imported about 7,200 barrels per day (bbl/d) of ethanol from Brazil in 2005.2
Finally, studies are underway on cellulosic ethanol, a product that can be made from other sources such as wood pulp, corn stalks sugarcane or switch grass. This appears to be a more promising solution than ethanol generated from corn. Brazil has been utilizing sugarcane based ethanol for nearly thirty years.
For the foreseeable future, we believe biodiesel, diesel, electric, hydrogen, natural-gas, and more efficient gasoline cars are the solution to the complex problem of energy efficiency.
The government has a great web site devoted to driving and fuel efficiency. You can view it by clicking here.
See which cars are the best and worst at fuel economy. Just click here.
Take a moment and retrieve your owner's manual from beneath the junk in the glove box. In the back of the manual is the maintenance schedule. There are usually two of them. Schedule A for normal driving and Schedule B for driving in difficult conditions such as a lot of dust. Determine which maintenance schedule is best for you and follow the manufacturer's recommendations.
You should inspect your vehicle each month to make certain you don't overlook a potential maintenance or safety problem. You can download our monthly checklist in Word format by clicking here.
Despite your best efforts, accidents happen to the best of us. You can download our accident packet in Word format by clicking here.
That covers automobile safety. Next, we'll discuss airline safety and some things you can fo to make your trip as uneventful as possible. Just click here.
1The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. Vol. 40, number 6. March 16, 2005. http://www.iihs.org/sr/pdfs/sr4006.pdf
2Energy Information Association, Department of Energy, http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/cabs/Brazil/Oil.html