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Comment by Devilboy | Hacker News Reader

BMW has a system in their top-end saloons that will safely pull your car over to the side of the road without crashing if the driver is suddenly incapacitated (e.g. a heart attack). These system are great and I hope we can overcome the social barriers eventually. Car accidents are still the #1 cause of preventable death worldwide.

EDIT: Here's another great system expected to start trials in 2011: http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/11/road-trains-and-modular-veh...

If you have a vehicle fitted with this system you'll be able to join 'road trains' where the front vehicle is driven by a professional driver (e.g. truck or bus driver) and the rest of the cars follow behind it - driven automatically.

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Car accidents are still the #1 cause of preventable death worldwide.

That strikes me as unlikely, given that car accidents kill something like 50,000 people a year in the US. Just inside the US, an obvious candidate for prevention -- medical mistakes -- kills far more people. (Estimated at 200k per year preventable deaths in hospitals alone.)

Casting our glance worldwide, poorer nations have millions of deaths from causes that aren't even "hard problems", such as clean drinking water, food distribution (solved in Europe in about the 1700s), malaria (solved in America over half a century ago), etc, etc.

(Estimated at 200k per year preventable deaths in hospitals alone.)

For the United States ALONE? I don't buy it. But prove me wrong by citing an authoritative source if there is one.

Citing an authoritative source doesn't prove you wrong any more than it proves global warming is happening ;)

Be that as it may, see generally To Err Is Human by the Institute of Medicine (an arm of the National Science Foundation), which put the tally at 100k back in 1999, or Dr. Chunliu Zhan and Dr. Marlene R. Miller in a research study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) in October of 2003.

Thanks for the source. That was easy to Google with the clear information you provided. No, several of those causes of death would not fit the usual definition of "preventable deaths." Those patients may not have received the best care that they should have received, but it's overextrapolating to say that they died but for errors in treatment.

The Zhan & Miller study in 2003 supported the IOM's conclusion of ~98k deaths due to medical errors. The 200k number you quoted earlier was "found" by a study by some random website and was not published in any medical journal.

Not to downplay the severity of the issue, but there is a big difference between 100k and 200k lives.

World stats (causes of death) according to WHO:

1) Coronary heart disease - 12.2%

2) Stroke and other cerebrovascular diseases - 9.7%

3) Lower respiratory infections - 7.1%

4) Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease - 5.1%

5) Diarrhoeal diseases - 3.7%

6) HIV/AIDS - 3.5%

7) Tuberculosis - 2.5%

8) Trachea, bronchus, lung cancers - 2.3%

9) Road traffic accidents - 2.2%

Although maybe it's more correct to say the leading cause of accidental death is car crashes. I guess 'preventable' is too broad a word.

Yes. In the public health course I took last semester, road traffic accidents were the most common form of death by injury, if I remember correctly. Turns out, tobacco use is the leading cause of preventable death worldwide, a label applied to diseases that can be avoided through the use of vaccination or healthy behavior.

"Preventable" has a fairly specific meaning in the public health community, as opposed to its common-use dictionary definition. Obviously, the latter isn't very useful since most ailments are "preventable" if you think broadly enough.

It appears that the leading cause of death for folks under the age of 35 is auto accidents (the bulk of 'unintentional injuries' if I understand the data correctly).

http://www.chdl.org/Projects/10%20Leading%20Causes%20of%20De...

N.B. saloon == sedan. (As with many of the Britishisms in my brain, I learned 'saloon' from The Economist.)

What, you don't watch Top Gear?

Though more entertaining than educational, I know the difference between my boot from my bonnet thanks to that show, as well as what a saloon, spanner, pillock and many other british-english mannerisms mean.

And here I was searching Google Maps for a classy place to drink and brawl.

how does that work if you're not right next to the shoulder?

my guess is lasers, they already check to alert you when you have cars in your blind spot, so it most likely checks those before moving you over.

GPS combined with various road / traffic sensors. VW has a system that can drive itself all the way to a hospital (or anywhere really) in city traffic. They're going to trial some of these systems in Germany this year. Because of more stringent liability laws in the US you won't see it in America any time soon though.

uh...then why are the darpa challenge guys having so much trouble? surely darpa would just give the money to one of the big car manufacturers if this was a solved problem?

The DARPA challenge was five years ago! This is the result of advances made in those challenges.

The Stanford guys have advanced so much that they'll take it on a rally track this year: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-CuVVZq9GfY

erm...the urban challenge was 2007.

The first DARPA challenge was in 2004. In 2005 and 2007 most of the teams easily completed the challenge so the problem is definitely 'solved' now. There's no more prize money anymore. Its over! The tech is here now.

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