TWENTY-FIVE-YEAR statistics, detailed in this paper, show declining accident and fatality rates despite radical increase in vehicle registrations and annual vehicle miles.
The author shows how the passenger-car industry has built safety into vehicles to the point where-as an example-only 14% of accidents on the Pennsylvania Turnpike over its 13-year history were attributed to vehicle failures.
Paralleling these efforts and the increasing emphasis on safer highways, better traffic management and driver education, are extensive studies aimed at bypassing the human factor and increasing human safety in automotive vehicles. Among those described here are crash investigations, laboratory tests of safety devices, and establishment through various other means of design criteria for human impact tolerance.
