So, I was curious enough about this to look up this PDF from the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration from 2018, from an investigation of 2,189,000 crashes from 2005-2007. According to it, the "critical reason" for a crash comes out to roughly 94% drivers, 2% vehicle, 2% environment, and 2% unknown. Of those vehicle-related crashes, the breakdown ends up being about 35% tires/wheels related, 22% brakes related, 3% steering/suspension/transmission/engine related, and 40% other/unknown vehicle-related problem. (The study acknowledges that there were "no detailed inspections of vehicles" and that the causes "were mainly inferred through external visual inspection of the vehicle components," which "resulted in mostly external, easily visible factors" being cited, which probably why so many are given as "unknown".)Imagine if you had to go through a careful safety checklist, comparable to a pre-flight checklist, every time you took your car out on the road. A five minute trip to the shops would need to be prefaced by a 15 minute safety check. And then again before you drove home again.
That would sure make society different.
2025-01-11 Rerun commentary: That would also make our roads a heck of a lot safer.
So in the vast majority of cases, the problem is the driver rather than the vehicle, and even in the cases where the vehicle was assigned as the critical reason for the crash it's not clear if it was defect or simply something that happened while driving; a "tire-related problem" could mean a blowout from running over a sharp piece of scrap metal which resulted in loss of control and a crash, rather than a defect in the tire which could have been caught in a pre-drive check.
There are a few things I can think of that would be nice for a pre-drive check, such as an alert if one of your external lights has gone out (since a lone driver can't really check them). My car (a 2018 model) tells me if the pressure in any of my tires is getting too low, which is useful. I'm not enough of an auto mechanic to know what other kinds of diagnostics could reasonably be added, though.
Statistics: Posted by Philadelphus — 11 Jan 2025 22:04