With all the convenience and self-determination of human driven automobiles, it may be tempting to overlook that they have also been the most deadly weapon ever created. The internal combustion engine (ICE) motor car, driven by inherently erratic humans, has killed more people (not to mention injures and environmental damage) than both the nuclear bomb and the AK-47 assault riffle together. Fortunately EV driver-less autos are en route to alleviate the carnage. See Driverless cars may kill off the world’s deadliest invention:
About 1.25m people are killed in road traffic accidents a year, accounting for 2.2 per cent of all deaths globally, according to the World Health Organization. Accurate data on how many people in total have been killed by cars in the past century are hard to find. But 50m seems a fair guess. That compares with the 123m in all wars in the 20th century.
If that level of carnage were not bad enough, cars have also contributed massively to environmental pollution and adverse climate change. As an additional malus, the car’s thirst for oil has handed billions of dollars in revenues to some of the world’s most regressive regimes: Saudi Arabia, Russia and Venezuela.
Fortunately, the end of the human-driven, petrol-fuelled car may be in sight…
Last week, Philip Hammond, the British chancellor, said he wanted the UK to be one of the first countries to allow “genuine driverless cars” on its roads by 2021.
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