Too busy to read?

The statistics show that nearly 1.3 million people die in road crashes each year - on average 3,287 deaths a day. An additional 20-50 million are injured or disabled. Road traffic accidents rank as the ninth leading cause of death and account for 2.2 per cent of all deaths globally.8 By comparison, deaths from plane crashes totalled 303 in 2016 and just 79 in 2017.

Throughout human history, we've relied on the same tried-and-true approach to keeping our technology beneficial: learning from mistakes. We invented fire, repeatedly messed up, and then invented the fire extinguisher, fire exit, fire alarm and fire department. We invented the automobile, repeatedly crashed, and then invented seat belts, air bags and self-driving cars. Up until now, our technologies have typically caused sufficiently few and limited accidents for their harm to be outweighed by their benefits.

As cars become more digital, they will tend to be swapped and shared and used in the same social way we swap digital media. The more we embed intelligence and smarts into the objects in our households and offices, the more we'll treat these articles as social property.

Roughly two thirds of the carbon footprint of driving an oil-powered car is down to the fuel and the rest comes from the emissions involved in manufacturing the car in the first place. So, unless they are very inefficient, cars should be looked after and kept on the road for a long time.

Diesels became popular in the UK for their supposed carbon efficiencies. However, this benefit is marginal because whilst diesel cars do a few more miles to the gallon, a gallon of diesel also has about 20% more carbon in it.

SELL YOUR CAR IN FEWER THAN SEVEN YEARS. The real savings come once you've paid off your car loan and driven it for as long as possible. Most people sell their cars far too early. It's much cheaper to maintain your car well and drive it into the ground.

In the year 2000, wars caused the deaths of 310,000 individuals, and violent crime killed another 520,000. Each and every victim is a world destroyed, a family ruined, friends and relatives scarred for life. Yet from a macro perspective these 830,000 victims comprised only 1.5 per cent of the 56 million people who died in 2000. That year 1.26 million people died in car accidents (2.25 per cent of total mortality) and 815,000 people committed suicide (1.45 per cent).

Long ago it should have been clear that a small percentage of drivers - drunken drivers, for instance, or the 5 per cent who are 'accident-prone' and cause three quarters or so of all accidents - are beyond the reach of driver training and can cause accidents on the safest road.

Right now, however, most automakers have poor platform strategies. Their profitable revenue streams do not lie in car sales. Rather, the cash cow is after-sales service and extra parts. And to capitalise on this, they need extremely good customer retention. Retention issues are critical to profitability.

In the UK 40,0007 people a year die prematurely from air pollution, and vehicles cause 8,900 of those deaths. That is five times more than the 1,775 who died in road traffic accidents.

In the United States, with its high safety standards, motor vehicle accidents killed about 35,000 people last year--seven

Car accidents alone took over 1.2 million lives in 2015,