Car things : comments [Matthew's Journal]

Do you know whether 1 accident per 1000 miles is a dreadful overestimate? Because I can't find the relevant statistics online.

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I seem to be spending my life arguing about road traffic accident rates on LJ! That publication at least says there are 32 million cars, with 3 million claims on the insurance (but only 281,000 severe accidents per year, obviously cars crumple before people). Which is crazy-high (1 in 10 cars claim on their insurance in a year?) But still, I think average milage is about 10,000 so if it's a 10% chance of crashing in 10,000 miles, then, very crudely, it would be a 0.001% chance of crashing in 1 mile, making Emp's 10 mile journey carry a 0.01% chance of crashing - so the excess cover should be more like 5p than 5 pounds.

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Ah, right, that makes sense.

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I am probably an averagely skilled driver, and I would think an accident per 1000 miles dreadful. I had a car accident between 8 and 10 years ago when I neatly slid the car off the road on a bit of black ice, doing about £10 of damage. (Then the towing company did several hundred pounds worth of damage dragging it out over a concrete drain emplacement. No, we didn't have the energy to take them to court.)

Still, my annual driving has varied between 6000 and 12000 miles (more often over 10k), so that would be one accident in the last 72,000 miles, or perhaps much more - and I am sure that I am not the best driver around by a long chalk. The risk over a few tens of miles should, statistically, be too small to regard as a problem, UNLESS the loss of £500 would be a major disaster.

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I've rented quite a few cars, as it's our usual thing on holiday or for a large roadtrip, and we've used hire cars for a lot of inter-state trips, and the only time I did any damage was when there was a bad pothole in the middle of the road that bent the wheel rim when I failed to avoid it through not realising how deep it was. (This hire car travel includes things like driving down from Ohio to south Texas and back up via Oklahoma City, and random things like driving out from Las Vegas out to the California coast, and in England driving between Cambridge and Cornwall and Manchester.) So, at least for me, that is quite an overestimate. Then again, I probably drive over 20,000 miles per year, so I am used to driving. (In my own car, I've only had one accident, and that was a rather minor low-speed puzzling one; I've been driving for fifteen years now.)

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In cars I own, not hire cars, I realized I omitted mention of two accidents because I completely forgot about them because neither of them suggested anything to change about how I drive: they were both rather unlucky instances of me driving along quite unremarkably within my fairly straight lane at a sensible speed when a heavy thing took less than a second to go from being visible to hitting the side of my car rather hard. I think it goes to show that no amount of careful driving is going to guarantee freedom from accidents.

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Matthew's Journal

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October