The Limits of Car Safety.
Successor to 'Black Box'.
After the first road fatality in Britain in 1896 the coroner said, "this must never happen again". But it has - nearly 25 million times worldwide this century. The automobile is rapidly becoming the worst killer in history - a truly modern way of death which kills one person a minute.
This is the first book to examine the history of car crashes and the reasons why they happened. Was it human error or was the technology at fault? With 80% of drivers blaming accidents on other people, there has long been a deep-seated resistance to safety measures; and, until the 1960s, manufacturers found that safety was no selling point in the driver's desire for image, style and performance.
Due to increasing public concern over the years, however, manufacturers have responded by building dramatically safer cars. The latest developments have taken place in Sweden and Germany where some new cars have had black boxes fitted to record the circumstances leading up to an accident. Underpinning their work is the new breed of car-crash detectives, teams of doctors and policemen who rush to the scene of an accident to look at the whole crash environment and gather forensic evidence.
In the future, will technology save us by building safer, perhaps even uncrashable, cars and safer roads, or will our fatal attraction to the car - witnessed by our desire to take greater risks and by the growing phenomenon of "road rage" - remain an obstacle to finally ending accidental deaths on the roads?
