The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) recently released a major study regarding death rates from auto accidents, and while the results are not unexpected, they do provide some context for the (relatively) current state of vehicular safety.
According to the IIHS, the number of driver deaths per million vehicles registered in the U.S. has fallen from 110 for 1989-1993 models, to 87 for 1999-2002 models, to 79 for 2002-2005 models, to 48 in the most current study, which looked at vehicles from the 2005-2008 model years that were sold during calendar years 2006-2009. That’s a pretty dramatic decline, and the IIHS says most of it has to do with two semi-related factors. First, a number of smaller, rollover-prone SUVs from the IIHS’ first death-rate studies dropped out of production, and second, more and more of the newer sport utilities gained electronic stability control, an important technology for reducing these kinds of accidents.
