In addition, there has been testing going on withing certain car manufacturers using electronic automation. It has a LOT of glitches in it and won’t be ready until present technology is obsolete.

Your suggestion of mandatory defensive driving is a GREAT one! Here in the US to get a DL, they are more interested in making damned sure you show your ORIGINAL STATE ISSUED Birth Certificate, SS ISSUED PROOF of SS Number and PROOF of your exact street address of residence than they are of making SURE you KNOW HOW to DRIVE!!!! With that type of attitude, it’s no wonder we have ‘drivers’ who do NOT KNOW HOW to DRIVE!

Put a driver in a simulator, ring their phone and let them see what happens when they get distracted without the risk of killing them. They’d learn very quickly to let the phone go through to message service or voicemail. But i think the best way to reduce the road toll is to give up driving ourselves around and automate our cars.

I’m talking about a system involving cars that are capable of driving themselves which talk to a centralised traffic management system or series of systems each covering seperate geographic areas. So the car worries about driving itself and the big system worries about overall traffic flow. The advantage is that if the big system goes down all the individual cars can still drive. But you still get the advantage of the big system being able to control the flow of traffic to get everyone where they’re going most effectively efficiently etc.

Note that the only information the big system would need is simply “i’m this kind of vehicle, i’m currently in this location, going in this direction, at this speed” not “i belong to so and so, we’re going to thingy, etc etc etc”. Theres no need or even use in identification being passed back and forth. A destination might be useful i suppose, but again too much information would simply increase the bandwidth that would be required to no real benefit.

Remember we’d be talking about thousands of cars here. Maybe hundreds of thousands in the bigger cities around the world. So keeping the data exchange to a minimum would be vital. Politicians seem to have an unhealthy obsession with knowing everything about everyone and this has to be kept under control. Sure it might be neat to know who was involved in a car accident as soon as it happens, but since ppl who work for the govt will go to the accident (even if its just police and or ambulance) and find out who’s involved when they arrive, there is simply no need for the cars to blab this kind of detail. Especially since it would probably involve radio signals that could be intercepted.

By taking cars out of people’s control we could seriously cut the road tolls around the world. After all, they don’t call it ‘Human Error’ for nothing. Just as long as MS isn’t writing the code for EITHER the cars or the big system. Open source would be much safer than some locked down “you can’t look at it” proprietry software that would obviously cost too much and be too unreliable if EVERY single big govt owned computer system in the entire world is any guide.

Cigarettes, radios, 8-Track players, the list goes on and on.

Yes there is a problem with inattentive drivers. BUT banning certain things is no solution. These drivers will only find something ELSE to ‘occupy’ their time behind the wheel. Why not ban PASSENGERS???? THEY are distractions the same as talking on the phone!!!!! Why not ban GPS Maps in vehicles???? That’s the SAME thing as watching TV while driving!!!!! See the assinignity in all this banning of this gadget or that?????