Tesla drivers had 23.54 accidents per 1,000 drivers, a study found. Tesla recently recalled 2 million vehicles over problems with its autonomous driving functionality.
A friendly reminder that road safety advocates recommend against the use of the word "accident" to describe car crashes, because it downplays the fact that many crashes are preventable, either by better safe road design or by the drivers being more responsible with with 2 tonne machinery they are operating.
I've actually never seen the movie. I just know that it's a widespread view among people who focus on road safety.
Most news articles I can find dealing with this issue, like this one seem to focus mostly on the idea that one driver may be mostly at fault. Which is true and definitely part of the equation, but personally I'm even more focused on the ways in which the road design itself may have been a contributing factor. When you have high speed roads that also have a large number of driveways and side streets (i.e., a "stroad"), higher numbers of crashes are inevitable, and can be avoided by better design. Same with when you create bike lanes with no separation, or separated but giving cars high speed ways to turn across them at intersections. The design of that street is a significant contributing factor, and calling crashes an "accident" lets the designers and the politicians who signed off on it off the hook.
It’s not about the dictionary definition of the term. It’s about the subconscious effect your choice of language has on how people think about things. When you call something an accident it gives people the signal that there was nothing that could have been done, and so nothing does get done. There’s no pressure on politicians and engineers in most of the anglosphere to do any of the things that would actually improve road safety. Indeed, a lot of the time when they do try to make our roads safer, you see fearmongering and NIMBY opposition against the idea.
Changing the language is one small step in helping to make our roads safer by making it clearer that making them safer is something we need to be concentrating on.
If it isn't intentional then isn't it by definition an accident?
If I break my leg while mountainbiking it seems a bit unreasonable to claim that it wasn't an accident because mountainbiking is an extreme sport and this could've been avoided if I was knitting instead.
It's still an accident. Just look up the definition. I'd wager to say most accidents are entirely preventable as well, but that's not what determines whether something was an accident