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Comment by stefan_ | Hacker News Reader

If the US would treat car safety like airplane safety there would be no SUVs driving out there.

Airplane safety should be more strict than car safety, because the damage an airplane crash causes is a handful of orders of magnitude higher than a car accident...

Yet deaths in the latter vastly outpace adverse events in the former. What is the criteria by which public safety should operate? Is it biggest explosion?

Opportunity cost of safety improvements to vehicles. Airliners cost like $100 million each, so they can afford to perfect safety. You can’t get airliner-level safety in a vehicle that costs less than $50,000.

Maybe not airliner level of safety, but based on the top causes of car accidents, they could probably be reduced by an order of magnitude with relatively inexpensive improvements:

  1. better driver training
  2. breathalyzer ignition interlocks
  3. speed limiters (even more reduced speed at night/rain)
  4. traffic light detection/automatic braking
  5. enforced following distance

(I'd add "sleep/impaired driver warnings", automatic emergency braking (including pedestrian detection) even though it doesn't quite relate to the top causes of accidents))

Here's the top ten:

  1. Distracted Driving
  2. Drunk Driving 
  3. Speeding
  4. Reckless Driving
  5. Rain
  6. Running Red Lights
  7. Night Driving
  8. Design Defects/Maintenace
  9. Tailgating
 10. Wrong-Way Driving/ Improper Turns

Far more cars (than planes), far more drivers (than pilots), far less rules for permission (than a driver's license). Kind of an unfair comparison here.

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