For comparison, my risk of getting into a car accident is north of 1% and the risk of dying in a car accident is around 0.02%.
So in other words compared to all the other risks out there home electronics are very safe.
Woman on Plane : Are there a lot of these kinds of accidents?
Narrator : You wouldn't believe.
Woman on Plane : Which car company do you work for?
Narrator : A major one.
Even to the point where an actual horrific accident doesn't necessarily mean that vehicle is any more dangerous than other vehicles on the road, they just don't have that exact failure mode but do kill people nonetheless.
And no amount of money is going to buy perfect safety either. As always, engineering is all about tradeoffs, no way around it. Car companies have dropped the ball on safety in several cases, but just because somebody died, doesn't mean they did.
Reputational damage is so high from consumer deaths now days, the balance sheet comes out in favor of fixing issues.
You mean you'll only die or get injured in one out of a thousand home fires? That seems really low. But I'm picking nits.
1% of what?
Or “one in a hundred”.
It means that in out of a hundred trips, it’s pretty certain one will involve an accident.
Per a quick glance at NHTSA’s summary figures [1] I wonder if the previous poster is referring to the “1000 injured per 100,000 drivers” figure. Which divides out to 1% I guess, a little more in past years. But that’s a little awkward to express in plain language, in that one wreck can injure lots of people, and people can get injured who are not drivers (drivers comprise around half of the injuries, it looks like, from higher up in the table).
Although the total number of crashes (including the large majority that don’t involve injuries) still looks pretty wild as a proportion of licensed drivers. If I were trying to raise concern about cars, I’d point to that ratio of 1 collision (of any sort) for every 43 licensed drivers every year.
[1] https://cdan.nhtsa.gov/tsftables/National%20Statistics.pdf
That's partially because MonkeyClub didn't do the math correctly. If the accident rate is really 1% of trips (which seems doubtful), there is a 99% chance of an accident free trip, a (99%)^N chance of N accident free trips, and a 1 - (99%)^N chance of one or more accidents occurring in N trips. For N = 100, this is 63%, and for N = 365*2 this is 99.9%.
As you mention, the data from the NHTSA seem to indicate a much lower accident/injury rate. Based on this data from the NHTSA [0], and going back to 2018 to avoid any pandemic-related effects on the statistics, it looks like there was on average only 1 (police-reported) crash per 481 thousand vehicle-miles, or one crash involving an injury or fatality per 1.7 million vehicle-miles.
[0] https://cdan.nhtsa.gov/tsftables/National%20Statistics.pdf, other formats and more data available here: https://cdan.nhtsa.gov/tsftables/tsfar.htm
Or at all, since it’s just how possibilities work. I wasn’t calculating the annual possibility.
When I wrote: > For N = 100, this is 63%, ... I was responding to your comment: > It means that in out of a hundred trips, it’s pretty certain one will involve an accident.
Whether or not 63% == 'pretty certain' is another matter I suppose.
That seems about right. It’s one (probably minor) car accident per driver every 20 years.
Yep, totally.
Remember the counter resets with every ride: it’s the first of the hundred, with 1% possibility of (any) car accident.
https://ehlinelaw.com/blog/odds-of-being-injured-car-acciden...
Two rules for anyone reading: [1]: never, ever, be in the way of anyone - don't ever be an obstacle to traffic flow; [2]: if you abide to [1], consider you're the only sain person on the road who really knows how to drive, all others don't - everyone around is a danger to you, so be hyper vigilant, always.
In general, be polite and out of the way (both on the road and in life), and you’ll avoid most scratches and crashes.
And presuming everyone (else) is probably nuts doesn’t hurt either :)
If there is a 1% chance of something happening during an independent event, then to calculate the probability of it happening at least once across N events, you must use the formula 100% - 99%^N, where the 99% was derived from 100% minus the "1% chance" in the original scenario.
So a 1% chance across 100 trials is 63.4% likely to happen.
Look up the Birthday Paradox for more.
There's not as large of an incentive for product durability and repairability today as there was or should be.