Tom Dingus "Survive the Drive" PDF

Driving is risky business. Only cancer, heart attacks, and strokes cause more unintentional deaths among the general population. Driving is the leading cause of unintentional death for those between the ages of 4 and 34.

Unlike cancer, heart attacks, and strokes, driving does not discriminate by age. More than 37,000 deaths occur each year from crashes on US highways. Many of these crash victims are teenagers or young adults according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) Fatality Analysis Reporting System (commonly referred to in our industry as FARS). In fact, all you have to do is look at the 2016 NHTSA Summary of Motor Vehicle Crashes fact sheet—which is based on FARS information—for a sobering reminder of the risks that drivers face, from more than 3.14 million injuries sustained during the year to nearly 11,000 fatalities due to alcohol-impaired driving.

Maybe the risk of experiencing a fatal or disabling crash looks, relatively speaking, pretty low. After all, there are more than 320 million people in the US alone, 225 million of whom are licensed drivers. Let’s put your crash risk into perspective, though: by far, more people die from driving than from many of the recreational activities we think of as “dangerous.”