What Can We Learn, If Anything, from Drivers Who Have Never Been in North Carolina Car Accidents?

March 21, 2013, by Michael A. DeMayo

In our ubiquitous quest to catalog better ways to prevent North Carolina car accidents, this blog often goes far a-field to examine diverse ideas about accident prevention and indirect causation.

In a recent blog post, for instance, we discussed the possible positive impact of “power napping.” If drivers napped more, would they improve their capacities to pay attention and avoid crashes?

Here’s another source of potentially hugely useful information — people who have exquisite driving records.

Traffic accidents are in some ways random. If you or someone you love was recently hurt in a crash, you may have done everything right. But what if we could survey the safest drivers in the world — people who have driven for decades without getting into any trouble?

Perhaps we could glean key patterns and wisdom to disseminate to other drivers.

In much the same way that the gerontologists love to study centenarians (people aged 100 or above) for insights into longevity; so, too, could we learn insights about best driving practices by interviewing super safe drivers.

Even if such a survey only yielded one or two useful counterintuitive ideas about how to stay safe on the roads, imagine the power of those secrets. For instance–and this is a totally speculative “bad example” to illustrate the point–but maybe all ‘super safe drivers’ refuse to drive red cars. Owning a red car increases your risk of getting into a crash, for whatever reason.

If this insight could be validated and independently tested, maybe we could then make/buy fewer red cars and thus collectively reduce our lifetime risk of a crash by 0.05% or something. That might not mean much to any one driver. But when you extrapolate such statistics over the entire state or the entire country, we could be talking about saving dozens or even hundreds of people’s lives using this kind of creative, proactive thinking.

Of course, accident prevention is a complicated and dynamic topic. And if you have been injured in a crash, you’re far more interested in getting practical guidance with your Charlotte car crash case. To that end, get in touch with the DeMayo Law firm today at 1.877.529.1222.