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> the driver hit the pedestrian

It seems reasonable to me. Imagine you’re driving and you hit a deer. What do you say when you tell the story? “My car hit a deer this morning on my way to work!” or “I hit a deer this morning on my way to work!” Even my “Imagine you’re driving and you hit a deer” sentence reads weirdly in the non-person-based language.

If accuracy or confusion is still the issue “the assailant hit the victim” could be amended to “the assailant hit the victim with a baseball bat” to clarify.

It's funny you mention this particular phrasing. I used to work as a 911/police dispatcher so I was often literally the first person you'd tell such a story to. I had so many instances in which I would have greatly preferred people not use the "I hit ___" or "___ hit me"

>"I was on my way to work and this guy just hit me! He just came out of nowhere and hit me!"

Cue the inevitable asking of a) did he strike you with a fist? a weapon? b) did he strike you with a vehicle? c) if he struck you with a vehicle, were you in your vehicle or were you walking?

I got burned -many- times over taking the seemingly obvious interpretation of "I was on my way to work and this guy just hit me!" and assuming a "two-vehicle traffic collision" just to find out the caller was actually exiting a coffee shop when someone physically assaulted him, or was walking back to his parked car when he watched someone back into it, etc..

Even "I was driving to work and someone hit me" leaves such a plethora of questions unanswered that yes, in instances where -clarity- is important (having to be clear and succinct, not casually retelling the story at a bar) I would much rather hear "I was driving my vehicle when another driver collided with me" which isn't meaningfully longer and clarifies many questions about what happened.

> - For example, I find it inaccurate to say "the driver hit the pedestrian", which to me suggests a collision between two people, not between a person and a vehicle.

Or alternatively, they got in an argument and the driver punched the pedestrian.

On the other hand, you'd never say "the bicycle hit the pedestrian". It would be "the cyclist hit the pedestrian". The former would make it sound like the cyclist had ejected from the bike and the bicycle to continue onward and collided with the pedestrian.

Part of this may be that when a bicycle crashes into me, the 20LBs of bicycle is less important than the 150LBs of cyclist, whereas with a car it's the momentum of the vehicle that's deadly, but I suspect there's also just the fact that we've normalized absolving drivers and blaming the car itself.

Obviously, the correct solution is to say "the human-operated car crashed into the pedestrian", just as we'd say "the self-driving car" if it were autonomous.

> Regarding the term "accident"

I think in aviation circles the word "accident" is disliked because it implies a certain inevitability and tends to terminate the search for further underlying causes.

If it's a crash, then we find out why, and if it happened because there was some debris on the runway or a certain switch in the cockpit was in the wrong position, then we need to find out how that could have happened and what to undertake to make sure it doesn't happen again.

> the driver hit the pedestrian

Seems reasonable. Cars don't kill people of their own volition without a driver. And in similar circumstances we wouldn't say something like an AR-15 killed a person, we'd say a gunman/gunwoman/shooter did. Why should drivers get treated differently?

I find "the vehicle fled the scene" as a useful phrase that's used to distinguish this situation from the very different "the driver fled the scene" which is commonly used in the (not that rare) cases where the driver abandons the wrecked car after an accident, in some cases to hide that they were intoxicated.

I disagree. Shifting the agency to the driver is important enough to my that I recommend writers use "the driver fled the scene on foot" if that's what happened. (This particular phrase is actually used.)

It seems obvious that "the vehicle" is not doing the fleeing, so even if this is standard phrasing it should be revised.

Easy to have both -- "the driver fled the scene in their vehicle"

If I hit you with a wrench, saying "the wrench hit you" is clearly awkward and obscuring what matters.

I don't see the analogy. "I hit you with a wrench" by and large implies intent. A pedestrian being hit by a car is very rarely an intentional event.

Further, you tend to have control over the wrench in this scenario (and if I was hit by a wrench because you e.g. dropped it unintentionally, "the wrench hit me" is reasonable), whereas insufficient control over the car is usually the problem in a crash.

That’s nearly the point. It’s not that it implies intent, but that it implies agency.