Car accident

Car accidents are unintentional damaging events involving automobiles. Car accidents can damage one or more autos, people, or structures. Car accidents—also called traffic accidents, auto accidents, road accidents, road traffic accidents (RTA in many police forces' terminology) and motor vehicle accidents—cause thousands of deaths and hundreds of thousands of disabilities each year.

Terminology issues

There's a debate about the use of the word accident in the context of motor-vehicle incidents. Incidents often result from carelessness or deliberate dangerous driving, rather than from circumstances beyond the control of one or more participants. Some road traffic safety authorities have started using alternative expressions such as car crashes, car wrecks, collisions or incidents in an attempt to educate drivers and emphasise that many incidents are entirely avoidable; for example, the official UK statistics which were known as Road Accidents Great Britain (RAGB) are now known as Road Casualties Great Britain. Further, in some areas (e.g. Victoria, Australia), authorities are considering counting single-vehicle single-occupant road traffic crash fatalities in that state's suicide statistics as well as in road toll statistics.

Related Topics:
Road traffic safety authorities - UK - Victoria, Australia - Suicide - Statistics - Road toll

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It is thought that as many as nine out of ten injury collisions are the result of driver negligence.

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