The Bad News
World-wide, more than a million people are killed by cars every year. (The numbers are easy to check on line.) In the USA alone, auto accidents cost each and every American - man, woman and child - over a thousand dollars per year. That's over $150 billion a year. Every 12 minutes, someone dies in a car crash on U.S. roads, and every 10 seconds, someone in America is injured by a car and taken to an emergency department. Every ten seconds!
But that's just the tip of the iceberg. According to the National Safety Council of the United States,
The calculable costs of motor-vehicle crashes are wage and productivity losses, medical expenses, administrative expenses, motor vehicle damage, and employers' uninsured costs. [... ] The costs of all these items for each death (not each fatal crash), injury (not each injury crash), and property damage crash were:
Average Economic Cost per Death, Injury, or Crash, 2010
- Death $1,410,000
- Nonfatal Disabling Injury $70,200
- Property Damage Crash (including nondisabling injuries) $8,900
[... ]
Expressed on a per death basis, the cost of all motor vehicle crashes i.e. fatal, nonfatal injury, and property damage was $7,280,000.
[... ]
Since the number of deaths from car accidents in 2010 was almost 33,000, the total cost of them all was over $240 billion. In just one year!
World-wide, more than a million people are killed by cars every year. (The numbers are easy to check on line.) In the USA alone, auto accidents cost each and every American - man, woman and child - over a thousand dollars per year. That's over $150 billion a year. Every 12 minutes, someone dies in a car crash on U.S. roads, and every 10 seconds, someone in America is injured by a car and taken to an emergency department. Every ten seconds!
But that's just the tip of the iceberg. According to the National Safety Council of the United States,
The calculable costs of motor-vehicle crashes are wage and productivity losses, medical expenses, administrative expenses, motor vehicle damage, and employers' uninsured costs. [... ] The costs of all these items for each death (not each fatal crash), injury (not each injury crash), and property damage crash were:
Average Economic Cost per Death, Injury, or Crash, 2010
- Death $1,410,000
- Nonfatal Disabling Injury $70,200
- Property Damage Crash (including nondisabling injuries) $8,900
[... ]
Expressed on a per death basis, the cost of all motor vehicle crashes i.e. fatal, nonfatal injury, and property damage was $7,280,000.
[... ]
Since the number of deaths from car accidents in 2010 was almost 33,000, the total cost of them all was over $240 billion. In just one year!