by Brian Moody, executive editor of the website Autotrader, told me he expected more manufacturers to adopt automated safety technology in the coming years, “at lower prices and in more types of vehicles.” However, he continued: “We are talking about companies, and they are in business to make money. They don’t want to be sued, and I’m not so cynical as to think they don’t care about the deaths: they do. But at the risk of being rude, cost is a consideration.”
A young driver looking for a $40,000 vehicle may find one with a set of so-called nanny features, or one with a huge engine and asphalt-ripping torque, but probably not one with both. And young drivers, as has long been the case, tend to be responsible for much of the extremely dangerous behavior on American roads. In 2012, 4,283 drivers between 15 and 20 years old were involved in fatal accidents. In 2021, the last year for which there is data, there were 5,565. As with other demographic groups, more teenagers are speeding: of all driver age groups, young men are the most likely to travel above the posted speed limit at the time of a crash. fatal accident.
The purest expression of the phenomenon of speeding among teenagers is the increase in illegal street racing. “I think it’s a plant or a weed that hasn’t been taken care of and, during the pandemic, it just went wild,” says Lili Trujillo Puckett, who founded Street racing deaths in 2014, after Puckett’s 16-year-old daughter died during a street race. Puckett now works with courts in California, Florida and Texas on offender intervention programs. “When you meet these guys, they tend to tell you the same thing,” she says. “Yes, they know it’s dangerous. They know that they can get hurt and that they can hurt others. But they love the adrenaline, they love the excitement and they have that quality of immature mind: they say, ‘That’s not going to happen to me.'”
National data on accidents resulting from street racing is difficult to find, but officials in California, Florida and Texas, where the phenomenon is endemic, have reported significant increases in the number of complaints: In 2021, the Los County Sheriff’s Department Angeles received 1,380 calls. of residents about local races, up 60 percent from the previous year. Amanda Granit, a spokeswoman for the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office in Florida, told me that most of the runners county deputies stopped were young and male. But not everyone, she clarified: “We have also arrested female drivers, including a mother in a minivan, for doing donuts on the road.”
In September, the Department of Transportation released data from early 2023 showing that 21 states had recorded increasing rates of fatal accidents compared to the same period in 2022; 29 had experienced modest improvement. “I can’t say we have it all figured out because it could change,” says Col. Matt Langer, chief of the State Patrol in Minnesota, where officials recorded an 11 percent year-over-year drop in deaths. But that drop, Langer says, represents several dozen people alive now who would have been dead a year ago. “And what has made that possible is focusing on the behaviors that are killing people. So speed, seat belts, disability and distraction. “For us, 85 percent of our law enforcement work last year was focused on those four things.”
