Only looking at injury data in the real world would show that.
It's my understanding new cars are not significantly safer than cars from 10 years ago.
How did you come to that? The new cars are new and there's no real world statistics for them yet, if you only go by real world data.
This may not be safer as in better crash resilience, but safer as in you have a backup camera, and side sensors for changing lanes.
What if technology in the newer cars (adaptive cruise control, forward collision warning, etc.) prevents injuries altogether?
That is luck not skill. Humans are not good drives and never can be.
> Stay focused on the task at hand and be responsible.
That helps. It would help some more if you would also get updated training - safety engineers have discovered a lot of things over the years that few people know.
This is a stretch. The better argument is that the best human reflexes can't react to others' stupidity with the speed and precision modern safety mechanisms can.
It's both. Even if an accident is the other driver's fault, there are plenty of cases where driving more defensively would have let you avoid it.
But yes, there's luck too. If you're sitting in traffic at a red light and someone drives into you, not a lot you could do to prevent it.
More importantly, the OP should not claim skill even if he has some: that leads to complacency. If he claims luck he is more likely to admit he isn't perfect and thus pay attention to changes in what he best practice for driving. What he was taught in drivers training 20 years ago assuredly has some things that we now know were wrong, and it didn't even cover some things we now know is important.
But, it also sounds like, some of the driver assist features aren't so good yet either ( reading many of the other comments in this thread )
Most notably this happens when I'm driving down the freeway, and the car thinks something is in front of us that isn't and randomly slams on the breaks.
It has also happened when other negligent drivers have started merging into my lane (where I am), and the vehicle slams on the breaks, against my better judgement of slamming on the gas to avoid the collision because it would have been safer.
My daily driver is old and has no security features, and modern rentals are a nightmare for exactly those reasons.
Also, what's with the newer cars randomly beeping at me to communicate instead of presenting an actual sentence of information? Almost all the time I have no idea why the safety features are engaging because they only communication is a beep of some kind, leaving me confused and taking my eyes off the road to look for some supporting message in the car's interface.