It’s that time of the year again — the day the Orwellianly-named National Highway Traffic Safety Administration announces its official count of the number of people who died in U.S. automotive collisions last calendar year.

As always, the news this year is good: In 2010, only 32,885 people were killed in car crashes! Isn’t that heart-warming?

How is this good news, you ask? What would we be saying if 2,740 among us were dying each month in war, terrorism, or some other kind of accident? Would those deaths ever be reported as happily reduced? Or would the absolute number be portrayed as a scandal, a dire emergency, or an outrage?

Would we tolerate a governmental agency supposedly charged with reducing the deaths instead playing logical tricks with the numbers — say by reporting that, while a war was killing 2,740 people a month, there were fewer deaths per enemy bullet fired? No? Then why is the NHTSA’s habit of reporting automotive crash deaths as a number per mile driven — as if what matters is the risk per distance, rather that the risk per day — not taken as its own outrage?

The answer, of course, is that because cars-first transportation is the lifeblood of corporate capitalism, its inherent dangers simply must be packaged in a favorable light, the millions of dead be damned.

In another piece of unsurprising news, AOL Autos reports that the voice-command media-control systems that car corporations and their various partners are pushing are quite crappy.

Only the most sophisticated systems work consistently. And even the best ones have some persistent flaws: Women’s voices can be tricky for the technology to decipher, especially when using navigation, causing many female drivers to give up trying. Drivers with foreign accents say it won’t work for them. Even drivers with thick regional accents can have trouble.

Many issues with women’s voices could be fixed if female drivers were willing to sit through lengthy training, [car capitalist] Tom Schalk says. Women could be taught to speak louder, and direct their voices towards the microphone. But he admits that most customers don’t have the patience to figure it out, and are then easily discouraged. Even if a system successfully works 85 to 90 percent of the time, many drivers grow frustrated and call it a failure.

Of course, the real problem with voice-commanding media devices is that it is a form of knowing mass murder by car capitalists, as the research has demonstrated.

Safety advocates like the Governors Highway Safety Association say drivers are distracted by a growing number of gadgets that cause them to look away from the road, such as cellphones, MP3 players and GPS devices. They believe drivers’ divided attention is behind an increase in fatal accidents caused by distracted driving: Distracted driving was a factor in 16 percent of all fatal accidents in 2009, up from 10 percent in 2005, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

Six percent of 2009′s U.S. auto-crash deaths, by the way, is 2,028.

The industrialists’ response to the blatant facts?  The usual: the heroin dealer’s argument:

[S]afety advocates such as Jonathan Adkins, spokesman for the Governors Highway Safety Association, argue that too often, things go wrong, leaving drivers tinkering with display screens instead of watching the road.

“Why do we need to be doing this?” asks Adkins. “Driving is a really complex task; you have to be able to react to what other cars are doing. If you’re fiddling with these systems, it can be the difference between life and death.”

But the auto industry argues that drivers will never put away their phones and other devices, so voice-activated technology is the only option to keep drivers focused on the road.

In an attempt to make the technology less distracting, software developers are trying to make the process more natural. Ideally, drivers would feel like they are talking to a passenger in the car, says Tom Schalk, vice president of voice technology for auto supplier ATX Group.

Schalk says drivers will bring technology into their cars, even if it’s legally banned. They’ll continue talking on cellphones and twiddling with their GPS systems, looking away from the road while doing it.

The federal government’s approach to such felonious excuses?

Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood has met with the top executives at seven car companies, including General Motors, Ford, Toyota, and Honda, to discuss what the companies can do to keep distractions at a minimum.

LaHood won’t say whether he thinks voice recognition technology will solve the problem. He’s leaving it up to the industry to figure that out.

“We’re hoping that they’ll put their creative juices to work in helping us solve this very, very serious and dangerous problem,” he said during a recent press conference.

Yes, creative juices.

If it weren’t for the refusal to pass the obvious laws banning all telephony and texting while driving, the use of things like Ford Sync would also be manslaughter, from the point of view of the driver.

As it stands, the sponsored almost-manslaughter is a source of entertainment to some:

But sometimes the mistakes just turn into laughter. Anthony Castillo has a Ford Fusion, and generally loves the SYNC system. But when he wants to make his kids laugh, he tells it to call his wife, Amy.

Instead, it calls someone from Castillo’s phone book named Peter Schkeeper.

“It gets them laughing every time,” Amy Castillo says.

Like so much else in the market-totalitarian United States of America, Big Brother would be hopping jealous of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Not only does the agency get away with its name — as if “safety,” rather than danger, is the topic raised by “highway traffic” — but it also functions as a more or less open adjunct to the corporate car-sales effort.

Consider the issue of NHTSA “frontal crash tests,” the procedure that yields the “government 5-star ratings” that are a staple in automotive advertising. If the truth be told, these tests are merely another form of public subsidy to cars-first transportation. As a basis for making marketing claims, they are gold. As a source of legitimate information about the risks of owning and operating any particular car, however, they are close to meaningless.

This is so for two main reasons.

First, the NHTSA rates cars only within what it calls (in perhaps the only space in mainstream America where the “c”-word has legitimacy) “vehicle classes.” These are:

Passenger cars mini (PC/Mi) (1,500-1,999 lbs. curb weight)
Passenger cars light (PC/L) (2,000-2,499 lbs. curb weight)
Passenger cars compact (PC/C) (2,500-2,999 lbs. curb weight)
Passenger cars medium (PC/Me) (3,000-3,499 lbs. curb weight)
Passenger cars heavy (PC/H) (3,500 lbs. and over curb weight.)
Sport utility vehicles (SUV)
Pickup trucks (PU)
Vans (VAN)

Thus, a vehicle “class” is really a weight-grouping.

And here’s the kicker: The NHTSA conducts crash tests only between vehicles belonging to the same weigh-class. It does not conduct tests of crashes between vehicles in different classes! Hence, the number of “government stars” a particular car gets is a measure only of how it compares in a crash with other vehicles of its own mass. The stars provide zero information about the safety of cars in crashes between “classes.”

Think this doesn’t matter? Consider this photo of a head-on collision at a mere 34 miles-per-hour between a medium-sized Audi Q7 SUV and a Fiat 500, a model about to be introduced by Chrysler/Fiat in the United States.

Motorauthority.com reports:

The result was worrying, for the passengers in the Fiat 500 at least, confirming the old adage that size does matter.

In particular, the testers noted that the driver of the Fiat 500 was very vulnerable as the driver’s airbag can force the driver’s head towards the A-pillar, which causes the upper body to come into contact with the steering wheel. ADAC also noted that the airbag burst shortly after deploying, and that the sheer force of the crash would have caused serious, life threatening injuries to the driver – especially in the neck, leg and pelvic areas.

In contrast, the Q7 fared much better than the Fiat 500. The injury risks for every passenger in the Q7 was low – while not even passengers in the back seats would have been spared from injury in the 500, despite it being a frontal crash.

ADAC concluded that the Fiat’s poor performance was due to the great mass of the Q7 and its front-flat structure which is not conducive to spreading the impact of crash energy. The results clearly demonstrate why consumers [sic] shouldn’t compare safety ratings between different classes. The Fiat 500, for example, garnered a five-star safety rating in its class from EuroNCAP, while the Q7 only managed to gain four stars.

Meanwhile, the second factor that renders NHTSA testing a joke is the fact that they are based on flat-frontal, not offset, impacts. To derive its scores, the NHTSA drives test cars straight and square into a wall. In the real world, of course, this kind of flush, symmetrical impact is extremely rare, as almost all auto collisions happen off-center and/or at angles, which has the effect of exerting the force of the crash on only a part of the vehicle, rather than through the whole frame. This, in turn, greatly multiplies the problem of “intrusion,” meaning the amount of the car that gets shoved into the spaces occupied by driver and passengers. Intrusion, of course, is one of the main risk factors for serious injury or death in car crashes.

The NHTSA star system measures neither inter-class nor offset collisions. The NHTSA star system, therefore, serves one purpose and one purpose only: permitting car corporations to make inflated safety claims in their advertisements.

In yesterday’s edition of The New York Times, Maureen Dowd reported on her visit to the Ford Motor Company. Dowd, it seems, had previously questioned the car capitalists’ plans to further heighten the inherent danger of operating their Earth-destroying waste machines by building more personal electronic gadgetry into dashboards. Invited to come to Detroit for a dose of propaganda, Dowd went and collected this amazing excuse:

Over lunch at Ford, Sue Cischke, a dynamic company executive, argued that even before cellphones and iPods, drivers were in danger of distraction from reaching for a briefcase or shooing away a bee.

“Telling younger people not to use a cellphone is almost like saying, ‘Don’t breathe,’ ” she said.

Given that Americans are addicted to Web access and tech toys, she said, it will never work to simply ban them. “So we’ve got to figure out how we make people safer,” she said, “and the more people can just talk to their car like they’re talking to a passenger, the more useful it would be.”

Yes, and making cellphoning while driving easier and cooler and more mechanically suggested is also a great way of ensuring that thousands upon thousands of young people will indeed stop breathing, for good.

All for a profit, of course, so onward they roll. They’ve got to, after all.

For reasons I will explain in my forthcoming book, Courting Carmageddon: Capitalism and Transportation in the United States, manufacturing and selling automobiles is roughly as heedless of and harmful to public health as manufacturing and selling nicotine-delivery devices.  Car crashes alone have killed more than 2 million U.S. residents in the past half-century.

Of course, thanks to their physical size and complexity and their enormous infrastructural and convenience implications, cars are far more important to corporate capitalists than cigarettes ever were.  Hence, they are also far more off-the-table in terms of public debate and defense.

I say all this as background to news that Mazda is now asking the Supreme Court to shield it from liability for disregarding state-level vehicular safety laws that exceed the federal regulatory standards administered by the always half-hearted (and oxymoronically named) National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

In explaining its appearance as a friend of Mazda, the Alliance of Automobile Manfacturers explains:

“This case raises issues of enormous importance to auto manufacturers,” said Charles Territo, a spokesman for the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers. The fear, he said, is that federal regulations will be “superseded” by a patchwork of state laws on personal injury claims.

As Automotive News explains its own headline on this story, the enormously important issue is whether automotive manufacturers can continue to deploy “less-than-best” products.

Suggestion: Compare the institutional urgency of this issue against the claims about manufacturing standards and corporate concern made in car advertisements.

Slight gap there, no?

And is there any doubt what the eventual ruling will be in the age of Citizens United?

Note also:  It isn’t just car capitalists, of course:

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, food producers and makers of children’s products have weighed in on Mazda’s side.

My great friend Douglas Pressman, who once escorted me into an ossuary located in the Czech Republic, conveyed this news item from the mighty USA Today:

Road accidents — not terrorism, plane crashes or crime — are the No. 1 killer of healthy Americans traveling abroad, a USA TODAY analysis of the past 7½ years of State Department data shows.

About 1,820 Americans, almost a third of all Americans who died of non-natural causes while abroad, have been reported killed in road accidents in foreign countries from Jan. 1, 2003, through June 2010. On average, one American traveler dies on a foreign road every 36 hours.

This, of course, is peanuts compared to the number of people killed here and around the world by cars when not on vacations or buying or spying junkets.

But it highlights the fact that our overclass simply suppresses rational public discussion of automotive death and dismemberment.

There were 2,996 people killed by the 911 terrorist attack. That is one-eleventh the number of people killed in U.S. car crashes in 2009, a year hailed by NHTSA officials and even Ralph Nader as a wondrously safe annum automobilis.

Despite their centrality to our transportation order and to ordinary people’s actual lives, the costs and dangers of cars-first transportation remain entirely “off the table” in our corporate capitalist, market-totalitarian society. Some deaths sell, and some don’t.

The Orwellianly-named National Highway Traffic Safety Administration usually releases its final count of the annual U.S. death toll from car crashes in early August, when the fewest possible people are paying attention to the news.

This year, they are making a big deal out of their preliminary estimate of the 2009 fatality count.  That’s because car-crash deaths last year fell to their lowest level since 1954.  “This is exciting news!”, gushed US Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood.

So, quiz question, folks:  How many U.S. residents died in such a wonderful, exciting year for automotive collisions last year?  33,963.  That’s 2,830 a month.  That’s 653 a week.  That’s 93 a day.  That’s more than 11 times as many people as died in the 9/11/2001 terrorist attacks.

But, it’s “exciting news,” rather than an unforgettable and unforgivable atrocity times eleven.

Why is that?  If all people are created equal and are endowed with certain unalienable rights, including the right not to be wantonly killed, then why is the disparity in our consciousness about the forces of evil so huge?  What kind of a society treats 40,000 deaths a year from its main means of everyday mobility as “exciting news”?  What kind of media parrots that remarkable interpretation?  Why, for that matter, is Consumer Reports among those media?

What may be the latest industry-wide/technologically-inherent safety cover-up in the auto industry is being pinned exclusively on Toyota by the powers-that-be.  Having just bailed out General Motors and Chrysler, U.S. overclass political and media entrepreneurs are almost certainly trying to add a bit of Japan-bashing to their efforts to revive a dying and massively dangerous capitalist pipe-dream.

The scandal in question, of course, is random runaway acceleration in new-make automobiles.

There are two possible explanations for why Toyota is taking the heat:

1. “This is Toyota’s Firestone”:   Toyota either made a mistake, or its manufacturing standards are worse than its peers’ standards;

or

2. This is bigger and deeper than Toyota:  Toyota is the leader in moving toward hybrid and all-electric cars, in which very large on-board batteries provide some or all of the vehicle’s engine power, and there’s an unacknowledged flaw in schemes to electrify cars.

Beginning at BMW in the late 1980s, more and more cars have incorporated Electronic Throttle Control (ETC), or “drive-by-wire.”  With ETC, the commands transmitted to the engine throttle from the gas pedal are no longer mechanical cables, but electronic signals from a computer that arrive via a data “wire.”  Hence, “drive-by-wire.”

Beginning about a decade ago, sensing the onset of peak oil, the car corporations started getting serious about making hybrid and all-electric cars.  Toyota was and still is far out in front of this movement.

So, is ETC an inherently dangerous technology?

And is the flaw in ETC being compounded by the move toward hybrids and all-electrics?  The potential problem here is that the huge batteries in hybrid and all-electric cars emit some serious electro-magnetic intereference fields.  Are these fields prone to disturbing the “drive-by-wire” commands flowing between the new cars’ gas-pedal and engine-throttle computers, thereby compounding the flaws inherent in ETC?

There are three ways to test this hypothesis:

1. Is there evidence of an ETC (as opposed to mere mechanical issues with pedals or floor mats) problem in known runaway-car incidents?

2. Are hybrids more prone to runaway acceleration than all-petro cars?

3. Is Toyota the only maker that has runaway-car problems?

On the first question, here is a good summary of what’s known.

Especially telling, in my humble opinion, is this summary’s report that there may be a cover-up of this issue being managed by the Orwellianly-named National Highway Safety Traffic Administration:

An electronic cause [of runaway acceleration] is championed by Clarence Ditlow, executive director of the Nader-inspired Center for Auto Safety, who dispatched a Freedom of Information Act request to NHTSA in search of documents on its investigation. Examining that data, he said it appears that the agency’s work amounts to less than the thorough investigation cited by the official.

On the second question, another expert blogger reports:

Meantime, another federal official close to safety regulators says NHTSA is investigating whether electromagnetic interference (EMI) could be causing glitches with vehicle speed controls in all cars and trucks, including Toyota products.   A Wayne State University engineering professor who consults with the industry believes cell phone signals, radar pulses, and other ambient electrical static, could be causing the problem.   USA Today reports a British expert on EMI believes the pulses are a “likely cause” of some of Toyota’s acceleration problems.   It is the basis of two class action lawsuits against the automaker.

Toyota dismisses the allegations, saying late Tuesday: “After many years of exhaustive testing — by us and other outside agencies — we have found no evidence of a problem with our electronic throttle control system that could have caused unwanted acceleration. Our vehicles go through extensive electromagnetic radiation testing dynamically.”   Engineers have studied this since the 1970’s but have never conclusively linked the issue to a specific problem.

Nevertheless, a guy who knows a little about computers, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, says his Prius is having runaway acceleration problems.

As to the third question, Toyota is not the only maker with runaway issues.

Even more telling, again to my own eye, is this:

Feds ponder brake overrides on all cars to stop runaway acceleration

So, the jury is still out on all this.  But it is hardly clear that the official story — the inexplicable return of shoddy Japanese manufacturing — is the proper verdict.

Meanwhile, there is a whole other sense in which the phrase “runaway cars” is exactly the right story we need to track.  Can humanity survive this make-or-break century without ending our insane reliance on automobiles for everyday movement?  Stay tuned…

It would be hard to invent another everyday transportation order as wasteful of human well-being as the cars-first arrangement that has long prevailed in the United States.  In this, the initial post here on Death by Car, I review the most basic facts in this area from recent sources:

► In the year 2008, automotive collisions killed 37,261 people in the United States.  That’s 102 a day; 717 a week; 3,105 a month. And 2008 was no anomaly: Since World War II, more than 2 million individuals have perished in U.S. car crashes.

► In a nation that likes the sound of “no child left behind,” car crashes have long ranked as the #1 cause of death for every single age-year from 3 through 21.

► In typical years, the number of people “severely or critically” injured, but not killed, in U.S. car crashes surpasses the number killed.  In the Maximum Abbreviated Injury Scale (MAIS), a standard international system for ranking and tracking traumatic injuries, “severe or critical” injuries are those that surpass “serious” ones.^v Injuries classified as merely “serious” (and hence not bad enough to be ranked “severe” or “critical”) only involve things like open leg fractures, amputated arms, and major nerve lacerations. To be classified “severe” or “critical,” a non-fatal collision must involve something like a severed spinal cord or a head injury with an extended period of unconsciousness and lasting brain damage.  In the words of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, “For MAIS 4-5 [i.e. “severe” and “critical” injuries], the predominant [monetary] costs [of the crash] are related to lifetime medical care.”  Of course, as the authors of one study explain, “Persons injured in these crashes often suffer physical pain and emotional anguish that is beyond any economic recompense. The permanent disability of spinal cord damage, loss of mobility, loss of eyesight, and serious brain injury can profoundly limit a person’s life, and can result in dependence on others for routine physical care.”

► If the United States has a national odor, it is automotive exhaust. The smell, of course, is but the tip of the iceberg. “Automobile emissions are the main cause of urban air pollution and contain thousands of chemicals, several of which are recognized as mutagenic or carcinogenic.”  In addition, as a glance at the roadside after an urban snowstorm will confirm, both by fuel combustion and the normal wear of tires and roadbeds, automobiles –- especially those with diesel engines — also create large amounts of “particulate matter.” Breathing particulate matter is most dangerous for children, the sick, and the elderly, and exposure to it is heaviest among the poor, who are disproportionately non-white, and who disproportionately live near major urban highways.

► Because air-pollution damage to the human body accumulates over time and complicates several complex multiple-cause diseases, at present, we can only guesstimate the exact amount of suffering and death caused by automotive air pollution. A recent special report in the Journal of the American Medical Association estimated that the overall annual “airborne toxics” death toll in the United States is now running somewhere between 22,000 and 52,000 a year.  Even if the bottom of this range is right, and even if cars account for only a quarter of all U.S. air pollution exposure, that would mean autos-űber-alles causes over 5,000 more premature U.S. deaths each year, on top of its collision toll. Meanwhile, some medical researchers suspect that we may be radically under-estimating air pollution’s impact on human health.

► Either way, it’s certain that automotive air pollution also produces a mountain of non-lethal health costs. San Jose’s The Mercury-News, one of the few major U.S. newspapers to attend to the topic at all, reports:

The death toll due to air pollution only begins to touch the vast magnitude of human suffering caused by breathing our dirty air — for every 75 deaths per year due to air pollution in the U.S., health scientists have estimated that there are 505 hospital admissions for asthma and other respiratory diseases, 3,500 respiratory emergency doctor visits, 180,000 asthma attacks, 930,000 restricted activity days, and 2,000,000 acute respiratory symptom days.

► Autos-über-alles’ biggest health impact may lie in its discouragement of walking and bicycling. Studies confirm that the United States has by far the lowest percentage of miles traveled by foot or bike in the world.  Meanwhile, a rapidly worsening obesity epidemic plagues the nation, with health consequences for Americans that may soon surpass those caused by cigarettes. According to the Journal of the American Medical Association, “poor diet and physical inactivity” are now causing 400,000 deaths a year in the United States.  Even if car dependency explains only 10 percent of the society’s deepening food-exercise imbalance, that would mean another 40,000 American lives being sacrificed to the automobile every year.

Detailed sources for all the above factual claims will be published in my forthcoming book, Automobiles-Über-Alles: Capitalism and Transportation in the United States (Monthly Review Press).