Most of the improvements are invisible. Better crumbing zones, better shock absorption, better composite materials. If you watch crash test of a modern car Vs 10-y old car, the later is significantly more dangerous. 20+ year old? Basically a death trap.

The number of deaths per 1 million miles driven hasn't dropped in the past 10 years so that puts a huge dent in your theory. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...

Maybe, maybe not.

Those numbers include pedestrian deaths, which the same wiki article states "began rising in 2010, and exceeded 6,000 by 2018" (constituting a higher percentage of deaths in 2018 than in 2010).

If you subtract off the 6400 pedestrian deaths in 2018 and the 4200 in 2010, then you do see a drop-off in fatalities per hundred million miles driven -- from 0.971 in 2010 to 0.935 in 2018 (and even lower in 2019 at 0.925, as the raw number of deaths went down as miles traveled went up).

(Further, this isn't even considering other non-automobile occupants in crashes, whether that's bicycles or motorcycles.)

Many of these features add minimal benefit if you do some common-sense stuff such as, don't drive when you're really tired (or drunk, or on drugs, etc.); don't play with your phone while you're driving; don't read, do your makeup, shave, etc. while you're driving. IOW put your focus on the task at hand and you don't really need blind spot detectors. Of course the reality is that people are pretty bad at these things.

Even people in good condition make mistakes and miss things. That's why airplanes have stall-warning stick shakers and pull-up alerts even for trained professionals.

I'll cape up for blind spot detection. My current car doesn't have it and I out-of-the-box I found that I had to move pretty extensively to see things that are to my 5 or 7 o'clock; even with my mirrors correctly positioned there's a gap between what I can easily perceive from the wing mirror and from the rear mirror and I had to buy blind spot mirrors to compensate. (It's much better with them.)

The car isn't even that long--the back pillars and back window are just weird (Hyundai Veloster).

I don't have the data, but my car insurance is considerably lower as a result of modern safety features in my vehicle. My insurer has a large checklist of things which correspond with a discount, such as automatic breaking, cameras, blind spot sensors, lane departure alerts and steering, etc. In total it comes to nearly 15% for my vehicle. I suspect it means these things actually save my insurer money on average.

Which brings me to the point of common sense. Not everyone shares it, or uses it, and so these features are useful. We can talk all day about what people should or could do, but at the end of the day, it just isn't going to happen.

Haha, automatic "breaking". Whoops.

As I understand it, the physical blind spots are getting larger in very recent model years as the car shapes keep changing. The blind spot monitors are partly a compensation for this, so you need to compare driving experience in these rather than with an older model where we easily drive without such electronic aid.

It's not clear to me how much of this change to the car shape is driven by competing safety standards, i.e. side impact and rollover protection, and how much it is the continuous march of fashion/stylistic tweaks.

Yeah, as you say, reality is far from the ideal. But I believe that even without those obvious problems, people still make mistakes and the extra couple layers of protection could save your life.

I was in a near crash without doing any of those things (night driving on a very fast road in an area I was unfamiliar with, and misread the shape of the road). I panicked and swerved without checking my blind spot (it was an empty road, or so I thought) and almost caused the other person to crash. More advanced blind spot monitoring systems could have largely removed the danger of the situation I was in, although obviously there is a lot that I could/should have done better myself. I think the next year's model had a HUD which showed blind spot status.

I found them invaluable, especially BSM saved me from a lot of near-crash situations. When dealing with fast deadly chunks of metal every % of reduced chance of death is a good investment in my book.

How many serious crashes or near-serious-crashes were you in in your prior cars without BSM? Assuming no other changes, that seems the most realistic measure of risk reduction.

You can’t measure the risk of a rare event like this. Accidents are (thankfully) rare events. There is too much variability with a single person. You can really only measure these risks across an entire fleet of cars. Rare events are Poisson distributed, which requires many observations to be significant.

So your question should be, across all cars, how many accidents have there been with and without blind spot monitors? Even then, it would be hard to control for all other factors (newer cars have blind spot monitoring, but are also safer in general, you need to compare similar years, traffic conditions, etc).

All of that to say — any single comment online is just an anecdote.

I agree. A scan of the research seems to suggest the risk reduction is bounded at around 40% on the high side of "potential risk avoided if all vehicles were equipped" with actual results of equipped cars coming in the range of 19-45% depending on the paper and type of accidents and aids focused upon.

Which is to say "quite meaningful", but when the absolute rate of serious crashes per driver is as low as it is, it's statistically impossible that driver aids are saving the typical individual driver from a serious crash multiple times in a driving lifetime, let alone multiple times since their introduction.

Another thing to think about is that “accidents” isn’t the only outcome that could be measured. I like my blind spot monitoring. But not necessarily because it makes me safer — I always turn my head to check blind spots anyway. But what it does do is make driving less stressful. Safety aids and driver assistance tools can make driving a better experience. That, in and of itself, is a worthwhile outcome.