Fear of Driving

Have you ever asked yourself what you fear in life?backing up, side lane-change vision warnings and fog
Ask any parent and they will come up with 10penetrating systems into cars.
answers generally involving their children in a matterOf course the other issue is cost and when you raise
of minutes. But in reality many of these fears arethe cost of the cars fewer people can buy them.
simply not so relevant. In a recent online study ofThe free-markets and economies of scale will
fear we found a few people actually did have realeventually take care of this; remember as far as
fears, which were quite relevant.deaths, Air Bags are in nearly all cars and at first it
One participant in the online study of what Americanswas only a luxury option on expensive cars.
feared most might surprise you. It was not GlobalIn fact, I too am so worried about the tremendous
Warming, Bird Flu or International Terrorism. The maledeaths in cars. It is like having a Vietnam War every
participant simply stated; I fear driving becauseyear in the US, yet we do not talk about it like that.
45,000 people or so die every year on the road.Today some are talking about the Soldier Deaths in
Indeed he is quite correct and the deaths onIraq and yet we kill over 15 times that many EVERY
American Highways are outrageous and the numberYEAR in our cars, imagine if we did something about
of people injured is unbelievable. The Death tollsthat, just think all those people die in vain every year,
average from 40,000 to 45,000 per year andand we did not even liberate a country or take out
although the death tolls per mile driven have comean evil dictator, what a pure travesty at home.
down a bit on both 4-wheelers and over the roadIt would be smart to focus on technology,
trucks the total number is slightly up.net-centric systems for transportation in the future, I
One would sure hope that we get some moretruly believe that, the number of lives we save will
transfer technologies from things like the DARPAbe significant and could even save the life of a family
Grand Challenges and that auto makers can put moremember too. I sincerely hope this article helps propel
devices such as Pedestrian Radars, sonar sensors forthought in 2007.