Some Car Facts

[KmH]

The average American car sits doing nothing for 92% of it's life. Accounting for all of a car's costs, fuel, insurance, depreciation, upkeep, etc the average US car owner pays $12,544 a year. Own a SUV or pickup truck? Add an additional $1908.
More than $0.80 of each $1 spent on gasoline is wasted by the inherent inefficiencies of the modern internal combustion engine. No part of our transportation infrastructure and daily lives wastes more energy than the modern automobile.

The traffic death toll in 2015 exceeded 3000 deaths per month, or more than 12 (per year) of the coordinated terrorist attacks on the morning of Tuesday, September 11, 2001 that killed 2,996 people.
2.5 million people are seriously injured in car crashes each year. The only wars we have had that had a higher injury rate were the Civil War, WWI & WWII.

If the price of gasoline reflected the true cost and various types of damage cars cause gas would cost way more than $10 per gallon.

Lets consider the impact automobiles have on Earth's global environment.
Commercial airliners contribute 8% of US transportation related greenhouse gases. Between June 2014 and May 2015 US commercial flyers took 779 million airline trips.
Americans take 1.1 billion car trips every day. And the vast majority of those car trips serve to transport just 1 person.
So cars, trucks, and SUVs contribute 83% of US transportation related greenhouse gases.

The total yearly economic & societal cost of motor vehicle death and injury is pegged at $826 billion.
The yearly direct costs alone - medical bills, taxes, insurance payments - come to $784 for every man, woman, and child in the US.

Lets look closer at the yearly serious injuries number (injuries requiring emergency room trauma care) which is about 2.5 million people per year compared to US wars.
If you combine the number of wounded & dead from the Revolution, the War of 1812, WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, & Iraq, - you would still come up short.

All this waste, pollution and carnage is pretty much taken for granted and just considered 'status quo'.

Against the numbers above, one of the hottest issues in the US is about the fact firearms are used to kill some 13,000 people a year in the U.S., not counting suicide, even though driving a car in the US is more dangerous than going to fight in a shooting war.

Fail.

 

[table1349]

But no one tells me my car is overbooked, randomly decides I have to vacate my car and then beats me up. I think I will keep my car.

 

[smoke665]

Saw this on the news the other night. Since it's on the tail end of my driving anyhow, I guess it won't matter much to me one way or the other.

Why hardly anyone will own a car in 2030

 

[snowbear]

I thought that gas powered lawn mowers were worse; and possibly boats (where fuel consumption is typically measured in gallons per hour)

 

[limr]

Yeah. Not giving up my car.

 

[limr]

Saw this on the news the other night. Since it's on the tail end of my driving anyhow, I guess it won't matter much to me one way or the other.

Why hardly anyone will own a car in 2030

I don't buy that for a second.

 

[Derrel]

The impact of Car #1, the white car, caused a lot of damage to the rear section of Car #2, the silver vehicle.


The driver of Car #3 is being checked out by paramedics, complaining of neck pain.



Here the silver vehicle, Car #2 has been separated from Car #1, at the direction of the responding police officer.

How WEIRD!!!! Today on my way home,les than three hours ago, my car (Car #4,not shoiwn in these photos) was hit from behind in a chain-reaction car crash at a stoplight on US Highway 30. My car's rear bumper took all the impact of the car behind me and left my car UN-damaged! Hooray! (I call that guy Car #3, the car that sdlammed into me)!

The two cars behind him were seriously smashed up! Car #2 had its rear section damaged quite a bit; the car that caused the crash, Car #1, was a white Hyundai Elantra driven by a 20-something young woman.

The 65 year-old driver of Car #3 was taken to the hospital.

 

[smoke665]

Few years ago just out of Huntsville, AL on the south bound lanes over the TN river I saw hood's and trunks crumple way up ahead. Some creative braking allowed me to not only stop but keep the one behind from rear ending me. When the dust settled and the chain reaction ended I was in the center of the bridge, the only one of 38 cars without a mark.

 

[table1349]

Saw this on the news the other night. Since it's on the tail end of my driving anyhow, I guess it won't matter much to me one way or the other.

Why hardly anyone will own a car in 2030

I read that when it came out. Made me think back to when I was a kid. We were supposed to all be using flying cars, as in the Jetsons. There was even a TV show, The New Bob Cummings Show, that featured an Aero Car. Where I live we still aren't using flying cars, so I will believe the above article when I see it.

 

[crzyfotopeeple]

Nice diatribe. It's almost a if you are offended at the thought of cars and personal transportation.

Pollution you say, how about all the crap in the street when everyone rode a horse. Yuck!

Also, that horse stood around most of the time consuming food and taking up valuable space.


Dangerous. Yes, operating a motor vehicle is an inherently a dangerous activity. However, the freedom of uninhibited travel is a fundamental exercise that is responsible for a lot of great things about this country. You take some risk to maintain personal freedoms.

I know though, let's just eliminate all the bad, scary things in the world because it doesn't fit someones idea of their utopia. Feeling the need to force my particular viewpoint on everyone.

I guess I could get caught in a shooting war while driving in my evil car. Imagine my odds of survival in that situation.

 

[smoke665]

In metro areas where traffic, and worse parking is a problem, a driverless electric car that I could summon to pick me up and deliver me to the next stop wouldn't be any different then using a taxi now. If vehicles continue to increase in price then at some point they will price themselves out of business. Ford and others are in a slump right now. The problem I see is that having fleets of driverless cars positioned in the vast rural areas of this country is going to be a logistic nightmare.

 

[KmH]

Nice diatribe.

It's not a diatribe. It's just facts most people aren't aware of.

 

[runnah]

Saw this on the news the other night. Since it's on the tail end of my driving anyhow, I guess it won't matter much to me one way or the other.

Why hardly anyone will own a car in 2030

Meh they always base these on large population centers but they forget that most of the country is big and empty and requires people to travel way more than current electric vehicles are capable of.

 

[runnah]

Nice diatribe.

It's not a diatribe. It's just facts most people aren't aware of.

Don't let facts get in the way of a good opinion I always say.

 

[table1349]

Other facts most people aren't aware of:

In 10 minutes, a hurricane releases more energy than all the world's nuclear weapons combined.

On average, 100 people choke to death on ballpoint pens every year.

On average people fear spiders more than they do death.

Ninety percent of New York City cabbies are recently arrived immigrants.

Thirty-five percent of the people who use personal ads for dating are already married.

Only one person in two billion will live to be 116 or older.

It's possible to lead a cow upstairs...but not downstairs.

Women blink nearly twice as much as men.

The Main Library at Indiana University sinks over an inch every year because when it was built, engineers failed to take into account the weight of all the books that would occupy the building.

A crocodile cannot stick its tongue out.

Table tennis balls have been known to travel off the paddle at speeds up to 160 km/hr.

Pepsi originally contained pepsin, thus the name.

Our eyes are always the same size from birth, but our nose and ears never stop growing.

The electric chair was invented by a dentist. (hmmmmmmm)

In ancient Egypt, priests plucked EVERY hair from their bodies, including their eyebrows and eyelashes.

TYPEWRITER is the longest word that can be made using the letters only on one row of the keyboard.

"Go." is the shortest complete sentence in the English language.

If Barbie were life-size, her measurements would be 39-23-33. She would stand seven feet, two inches tall.

The original story from "Tales of 1001 Arabian Nights" begins, "Aladdin was a little Chinese boy."

Nutmeg is extremely poisonous if injected intravenously.

Honey is the only natural food that is made without destroying any kind of life. What about milk you say?

A snail can sleep for three years.

No word in the English language rhymes with "MONTH".

Average life span of a major league baseball: 7 pitches.

Michael Jordan makes more money from NIKE annually than all of the Nike factory workers in Malaysia combined.

The volume of the earth's moon is the same as the volume of the Pacific Ocean.

Cephalacaudal recapitulation is the reason our extremities develop faster than the rest of us.

A cow has to eat grass to produce milk and grass is living.

The most common name in the world is Mohammed.

The cigarette lighter was invented before the match.

Americans on average eat 18 acres of pizza every day.

The "pound" key on your keyboard (#) is called an octotroph.

The only domestic animal not mentioned in the Bible is the cat.

The "dot" over the letter "i" is called a tittle.

Spiral staircases in medieval castles are running clockwise. This is because all knights used to be
right-handed. When the intruding army would climb the stairs they would not be able to use their right hand which was holding the sword because of the difficulties of climbing the stairs. Left-handed knights would have had no troubles, except left-handed people could never become knights because it was assumed that they were descendants of the devil.