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Comment by ericmay | Hacker News Reader

You don’t have to, but I am, and I’m encouraging others to as well. It’s not a crusade, it’s calling something what it is. Car crashes aren’t “accidents”. Oppsie we just had a fender bender where 3 people died. It was just an accident ya know?

It’s marketing and branding to downplay one of the greatest sources of premature death, wasted money, and negative externalities that exists. That way we can keep buying cars for no good reason and commute while we sit at home and isolate ourselves from our fellow Americans when we aren’t driving.

Responding to the person your responding to with “I don’t like it!1!1!” when they provided, ya know, some reasoning, is kind of a poor response. What’s a good reason to call them accidents instead of wrecks besides “this is what I’m used to”?

I’m open minded.

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There's a difference between a crash where the outcome was not deliberate vs say a deliberate attack on a convoy by ramming cars at it.

Accident implies it's not premeditated or deliberate, which, i'd wager, is the case of the vast majority of road incidents. That doesn't absolve drivers of guilt if they were in the wrong or doing something wrong at the time. But it does mean it wasn't deliberate.

Edit: You also forget that things like wildlife, mechanical failures and other things outside the control of a driver can be the cause of car crashes as well.

> Accident implies it's not premeditated or deliberate, which, i'd wager, is the case of the vast majority of road incidents. That doesn't absolve drivers of guilt if they were in the wrong or doing something wrong at the time. But it does mean it wasn't deliberate.

The vast majority of collisions are caused by driver recklessness. (Yes, a few are caused by mechanical issues etc. as you say - but driver recklessness (e.g. speeding) is the biggest factor). Calling it an "accident" does kind of diminish their culpability.

For this to be true I think you have to be using a basically circular definition of reckless driving, like "if it was possible for conditions ahead of you to change faster than you could brake, then you should have been going slower."

In reality drivers rely on models and predictions of other road users' behavior, and are committed by inertia to a course which requires those predictions to be true. We can tolerate more or less uncertainty, bigger or smaller margins, but a speed so slow that you can be sure of stopping in time for the most unlikely development right in front of you, is also a speed which is pretty much useless for transportation. The need to take this risk in order to go about your life is built into the whole system of urban planning and not something for which a particular driver is blameworthy. A driver becomes blameworthy to the extent that their tolerances were unusually tight for the situation. But even loose tolerances are exceeded some of the time.

> For this to be true I think you have to be using a basically circular definition of reckless driving, like "if it was possible for conditions ahead of you to change faster than you could brake, then you should have been going slower."

I'm mainly reasoning back from the fact that drivers are causing so many premature deaths, yes. "If you're killing this many people then you must be being reckless", but I think that's sound logic? But also if we look at things like e.g. compliance with relevant laws, that seems to suggest that drivers are reckless as a matter of course - drivers flout speed limits all the time, to the point that they will often try to argue that this crime is somehow a non-crime because everyone does it.

Isn’t driving at a speed and following distance that you can safely stop if you need to basic driving technique? In the country where I live insurance won’t pay out or will only pay a small amount for read-ending someone.

If you go through an intersection where you have a stop sign and cross traffic has a 45mph+ highway, without consideration for that cross traffic, it's probably going to hit you. They are relying on you to enter only when the way is clear.

One reason dashcams are so popular is people like to exploit the insurance presumption of guilt towards the rear-ender by getting in front someone and then slamming the brakes. Video which shows the scammer acting unreasonably to put themselves in the way can turn the tables.

> Calling it an "accident" does kind of diminish their culpability.

Nothing about “accident” implies lack of culpability. By your and other’s logic, essentially nothing can be an accident as ultimately almost everything is cause and effect. Your dropping the milk on the floor wasn’t an “accident”, it was the effect of you not paying attention to the task of carrying the milk carton and being reckless about it (as an example).

> Nothing about “accident” implies lack of culpability. By your and other’s logic, essentially nothing can be an accident as ultimately almost everything is cause and effect. Your dropping the milk on the floor wasn’t an “accident”, it was the effect of you not paying attention to the task of carrying the milk carton and being reckless about it (as an example).

If you were exercising reasonable caution when carrying the milk, it was probably an accident. If you were being reckless, then it wasn't.

The fact that drivers are such an overwhelmingly disproportionate cause of premature death suggests that they do not generally exercise the kind of reasonable caution that we'd expect decent people to use in everyday life.

Because if all crashes were labelled 'car violence' it may prime people to think that any innocent driver who crashed their car and caused damage elsewhere due to mechanical failure, an animal crossing the road at night, black ice or a pothole is guilty of negligence.

In that world there may even be someone on HN asking everyone to change the term to 'car accident' to prevent these innocent drivers being unfairly characterized as causing intentional or negligent harm.

Car wrecks and car crashes, at least in my mind, don’t have anything to do with culpability. Just like plane crash doesn’t.

The issue I see is “car accident” tends to normalize the destruction caused by cars. It’s a public relations campaign. Oil and gas, and other industries could use the lesson it seems. Don’t call Deep Water Horizon a malfunction or problem. Just say hey it’s just an accident. Nobody intended anything bad so what’s the problem? Rest easy, go back to sleep. Just an accident...

Nobody cares that car wrecks are a leading cause of premature death amongst teenagers for example. It’s all just an accident.

They care when you change the narrative back to what it truly is. Unnecessary and premature deaths due to intentional design decisions and subsequent, avoidable but easy to predict car crashes.

It is estimated that millions of animals per year are killed by cars in the United States alone. Seems like it happens enough that people should be driving slower and watching for it.

I'm not sure what that should be called, but 'car accident' seems like it doesn't describe it very well.

Source: https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/research/safety/08034/...

From dictionary.com: "an undesirable or unfortunate happening that occurs unintentionally and usually results in harm, injury, damage, or loss; casualty; mishap"

A car crash absolutely fits the definition. You sound like you want the definition of "accident" to be something other than what it is.

Yes, people are careless driving. Yes, that causes problems (and even death) that should have been avoided. But that still fits the definition of accident.

What about when you drink and drive or speed, or drive too fast for conditions? How is that unintentional when the action you take is intentional?

Otherwise, you're seriously giving an escape hatch to say, drunk driving, because "Hey I was just carelessly driving. It was just an accident. I didn't intend to cause harm, damage, or loss when I drank all of that alcohol and accident my car into someone else. 'Whoops'"

Anyway, let's say these are all accidents. Ok. We can also still call them car crashes and wrecks and that would be more accurate because these terms don't assume intention but merely describe what has taken place.

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