I’d bet you $1 per mile that if you surveyed 100 truck drivers, more than 61 of them would say they feel less safe being passed by a passenger car than a semi.
Backup cameras are being mandated on cars next year – not to make backing easier, but so drivers will stop running over their loved ones and random objects. Car manufactures aren’t putting technologies on passenger cars that speed them up when a semi is closing in on their bumper. They’re putting systems on cars (a standard by 2022) that trigger automatic braking when the car isn’t stopping as it approaches an object because everyone knows – in more cases than not – regular people can’t drive.
Whether it’s texting and driving, a satellite-radio-induced steering wheel drum solo to Van Halen’s “Panama” or turning to the backseat to discipline an unruly child, the levels of in-car distraction are climbing while the general public’s ability to focus on one mostly simple task is disappearing.
Reports released by the American Trucking Associations consistently show that car drivers are the cause of most accidents, and were the cause of a whopping 80 percent of the crashes over a three-year period from 2007 to 2009, according to a study conducted by the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute. Last year, a Tesla driving itself was found “mostly to blame” when it hit a semi and killed its driver.
According to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety’s Highway Loss Data Institute (HLDI), about 1 in 10 highway deaths occurred in a crash involving a large truck in 2015. That means the other 9 deaths involved car-on-car violence.
Despite the fact that trucks weren’t even involved in, much less the cause of, about 90 percent of on-highway deaths in 2015, about one in four passenger car drivers say adding safety technology to large trucks would help them feel better about sharing the highway.
