Driving While Human

Driving While Human: Is Car Safety an Oxymoron?

Catherine Lutz

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration just released its estimate for 2010's motor vehicle crash fatalities -- and it was great news. With 3 percent fewer deaths last year, 1,020 fewer American families woke up today mourning a mother or father, sister or brother, daughter or son.

Given the astounding number of miles that we drive each year as a nation -- 20.5 billion --our attention often turns to deaths per mile, where there was also good news: fatalities dipped even while miles driven rose. Credit is given to enhanced safety features in automobiles, improved road engineering, and successful safety education -- especially those efforts against driving under the influence or without a seatbelt.

So, can we keep the good news coming? Yes, if we recognize a few realities about cars and their drivers:

Driving is still the most dangerous activity most of us undertake each day.

This is because driving without error is impossible, and the tiniest error made in a car, even one with the latest safety devices, can have devastating consequences. Even now, each day about 90 people die and each year thousands are brain-damaged and wheelchair-bound after being hit by a car, in a car, or both. When we focus exclusively on fatalities, we can ignore the more than 1 million injured each year, a hidden nation of the wounded and their caregivers.

Just because the roads are safer, doesn't mean you are.
Individually, you may not be much safer. For one thing, people tend to take more risks, like speeding and texting, when made more confident by better-braking cars and newly-widened roads. And much of the risk reduction provided by safety improvements is erased if you drive more miles. NHTSA data also makes clear that how safe you are also depends on the region and town in which you reside.

Futuristic auto technologies are tantalizing, but driving will never be fail-safe. 
The promise that cars will someday drive themselves, eliminating human error, or be so engineered that drivers will walk away from crashes unscathed, is alluring. But even if we do getcars that 'talk' to each other and warn of an impending crash and "road trains" that speed traffic along highways, we won't unseat the drivers. And in all our fallibility, even if we do not drink and drive or text and drive, we will continue to drive while distracted; drive while tired or in a hurry; drive while none-of-the-above but still not in full control of our cars or environment. In other words, we will continue to drive while human.

And here's another rub: the vehicles of the future will still need humans to build them. In 2010 -- the future dreamed of by the drivers of decades past -- vehicle recalls spiked above 20 million, the third highest since record-keeping began.

The automakers are pushing new technologies that are at cross-purposes to safety.
Auto safety innovations, like airbags and electronic stability control, have so far kept just ahead of new technologies that provide yet more distractions for drivers. This year's high-profit margin offering from one of the automakers? A front seat 'infotainment' system that can find movie listings, tag songs, hold your restaurant table, and provide a hot spot for five laptops. Distracted driving now contributes to 20 percent of injury crashes and 16 percent of fatalities. If we keep loading our cars with more in-car electronics, we could reverse the gains we've made.

We can engineer cars and roads to be safer, but the safest way to engineer our communities is to make cars less necessary. 

As individuals, we each have options to drive less that can make our families safer --combining trips, walking or biking shorter trips, and shopping on the internet are just a few. Providing more and better transit options, planning our communities in smarter ways, and improving residents' ability to walk and bike to work, school, and shop will reduce the numbers of cars on the road and the number of miles driven: the surest way to improve the safety of our communities.

The progress that has been made in reducing fatalities from car crashes is worthy of celebration. We also must remember that driving under any conditions remains an inherently dangerous act, and we need to retain a healthy fear of the automobile. Though it is not as exciting as visions of vehicles hovering above highways, the most effective way we now have to protect our families from crash risk is to drive less.

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Will buying an electric car make an environmental difference?

Will buying an electric car make an environmental difference?

By Paul Rogers

Sure, you might get a carpool sticker and a tax break. But if you buy an electric car, will it make much environmental difference?

Experts say that depends on three factors: What were you driving before? How is your electricity generated? And how many other electric cars are going to be sold?

In many cases, people who trade gasoline-powered cars for electric ones won't be dramatically lessening the smog they emit. But when it comes to global warming, even when emissions from generating the electricity are taken into account, electric vehicles have a much smaller carbon footprint than gas-powered vehicles because they are much more efficient. However, it will take a decade or more until enough electric vehicles are on the road to make a significant impact.

"If you have a person who is driving a nice, newer car, having them switch to an electric car, there isn't going to be much benefit in reducing smog," said Tom Cahill, a professor emeritus of physics at UC Davis. "But there could be a whole lot of gain in climate change."

Because all-electric vehicles like the Nissan Leaf burn no fossil fuels, and plug-in hybrids like the Chevy Volt burn only small amounts of gasoline, tailpipe emissions from electric cars are basically zero. In smoggy cities like Los Angeles, driving one on summer days may actually clean the air because the tailpipe emissions contain less pollution than the air.

Yet most people currently buying electric cars weren't driving old, smog-belching vehicles. They are often affluent motorists who drove newer-model gasoline cars. And because California has for 50 years had the toughest tailpipe standards in the nation, a 2010 gasoline-burning car puts out only 2 percent or less of the pollution spewed by a 1980s model.

Along with the national-security benefits of reducing America's use of foreign oil, the main societal benefit of electric cars might be their dramatically smaller global warming footprint.

A 2008 study by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University found that life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions, which include emissions from both manufacturing and operating a vehicle, are 32 percent less from plug-in hybrids than from gasoline-powered cars.

That finding was based on America's electricity mix: 45 percent of U.S. electricity is generated from coal, 23 percent from natural gas, 20 percent from nuclear, and 12 percent from dams, solar, wind and other sources.

The global warming footprint of electric cars varies by region. Some states get nearly all their electricity from coal, the most polluting fuel. But only 15 percent of California's electricity comes from coal, nearly all imported from other states, with 46 percent from natural gas, 15 percent from nuclear power, and 24 percent from dams, solar, wind and other sources.

Using a nearly all-coal scenario for electricity, plug-in hybrids emit fewer greenhouse gases than gasoline-powered cars, the study found, but aren't as "clean" as ordinary hybrids like the Prius.

"The types of power plants installed in the next two decades will not only affect how much we can reduce emissions from electricity, but also from vehicles," said Carnegie Mellon engineer Kyle Meisterling, one of the study's authors.

In states with cleaner power mixes, plug-in hybrids have less than half the greenhouse gas footprint of conventional gasoline vehicles. Why? Efficiency, said Mark Jacobsen, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University.

In cars with internal combustion engines, only 20 percent of the energy goes to move the car and 80 percent is wasted heat, he said. But in an electric car, 80 percent moves the vehicle and only 20 percent is wasted.

"Electricity is more efficient," Jacobsen said. "As a result, you just need less energy."

In a recent study, Jacobsen computed the carbon footprint of every major energy source, wondering which would be greenest if America converted all its vehicles to run on each. He found that electric vehicles powered by wind energy were best, with a 99 percent reduction in carbon and air pollution emissions from the current vehicle fleet. In fact, every vehicle in America could run on the electricity provided by 144,000 5-megawatt wind turbines, he concluded.

Building them sounds like a massive job, but he noted that the United States built 300,000 airplanes during World War II. Ethanol ranked last in his study, with the largest carbon footprint.

"There's no technical reason we can't ramp up to a lot more electric vehicles," he said. "It's a question of whether society as a whole is motivated to do it."

Gas prices at $5 a gallon might provide motivation. But even then, the transition is expected to be slow. Americans bought 11.6 million vehicles last year. Including the popular Prius, just 2.4 percent were hybrids. Only three automakers -- GM, Nissan and French firm PSA -- plan to produce more than 10,000 electric cars a year by the end of 2011.

"Almost anything you do won't have much effect for five to 10 years because you have all these used cars that stay on the road for so long," said Tom Turrentine, director of the Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicle Research Center at UC Davis. "It takes 10 years to really move through the fleet and change it. But you've gotta start somewhere."

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