Welcome back to the latest episode of The Future of Automotive on CBT News, where we put recent automotive and mobility news into the context of the broader themes impacting the industry.
I’m Steve Greenfield from Automotive Ventures, and I’m glad that you could join us.
Let’s start this week’s segment with recent research on how vehicle size and weight increases damage severity in the event of crashes, and the probability of passenger death in the smaller vehicle.
The Economist analyzed 7.2 million road accidents involving two vehicles and found that heavier vehicles provide more protection to their occupants at the expense of those they hit.
The fatality rate is roughly seven times higher when colliding with a heavy pickup truck than with a compact car. As the weight of your car increases, the risk of killing others increases substantially.
For every life that the heaviest 1% of SUVs and trucks save (in other words, protecting its own driver or passengers), more than a dozen lives are lost in the other vehicles it collides with.
The probability of suffering a fatality in a two-vehicle crash with a vehicle that is 1,000 lbs heavier (which is roughly the difference between a Toyota Camry and a Ford Explorer) boosts the likelihood of death by 66%. A rough calculation is that if the 10% of vehicles which are the heaviest (i.e. more than 5000 lbs) were downsized to the next heaviest category (i.e. 4500-5000 lbs) then fatalities in multi-car crashes (which totaled 19,081 last year) might be reduced by 12%.
But, it’s worth noting that the safety benefits of vehicle weight suffer from diminishing returns. Once a vehicle reaches a certain weight, making it heavier provides little additional safety but will inflict substantially more damage on another car.
Let’s switch gears to address vehicle size and the impact on pedestrian deaths.
The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (or IIHS) found that larger cars tend to be safer for the occupants. But for pedestrians outside the car, it’s a very different story.
Bigger and taller vehicles are more dangerous for pedestrians, according to an IIHS study of real-world crashes. Vehicles with higher front ends and blunt profiles are 45% more likely to cause fatalities in crashes with pedestrians than smaller cars and trucks, researchers found.
Over the past three decades, the average U.S. passenger vehicle has gotten about 10 inches longer, 8 inches taller and 1,000 pounds heavier, according to IIHS.
Safety advocates say that’s a big reason why annual pedestrian deaths in the U.S. are up more than 75% since reaching their lowest point in 2009.
It seems like this race to buy bigger and bigger vehicles is an example of a classic prisoners’ dilemma. The incentive is for consumers to continue to buy larger and heavier trucks and SUVs to protect the driver and passengers, even if the data clearly shows that these bigger vehicles are much more likely to cause deaths in case of vehicle or pedestrian related accidents.
How do we ever slow this race to adopt larger and larger vehicles? From my perspective, I think this trend is going to be near impossible to reverse and get back to earlier times.
So, with that, let’s transition to Our Companies to Watch.
Every week we highlight interesting companies in the automotive technology space to keep an eye on. If you read my weekly Intel Report, we showcase a company to watch, and take the opportunity here on this segment each week to share that company with you.
Today, our new company to watch is Cygnus Traffic.
Cygnus Traffic is on a mission to improve transportation for everyone, by revolutionizing highway traffic management
Cygnus utilizes the latest AI technologies to predict and prevent traffic congestion in real-time, developing the next generation of highway traffic management.
Cygnus Traffic is developing the next generation of Variable Speed Limit (or VSL) management, enabling traffic control centers to predict and delay, minimize, and even prevent traffic jams in real time.
Cygnus Traffic’s solution leverages the latest AI technologies to create a smarter, more efficient transportation system.
If you’d like to learn more about Cygnus Traffic you can check them out at www.cygnus-traffic.com
So that’s it for this week’s Future of Automotive segment.
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Don’t forget to check out my book, The Future of Automotive Retail, which is available on Amazon.com. And keep an eye out for my new book, “The Future of Mobility”, which is almost done, and will be out soon.
Thanks (as always) for your ongoing support and for tuning into CBT News for this week’s Future of Automotive segment. We’ll see you next week!
