Older drivers in older cars: Increased accident risk

The seniors among the motorists are under a kind of general suspicion: particularly common, so the commercial opinion, be involved in accidents; All too gladly is the connection with a decreasing physical and mental fitness due to age. The receipt often also expand the car insurers to charge the older vehicle holders particularly high contributions.

It still goes

The current traffic safety report of the DEBRA now supports an extended view. The proportion of older people driving older cars is released disproportionately, says the test organization. Relatively rare, seniors would replace their old ones through a new car. It still goes, loud the common argument, and also a lot of kilometers is much less than in younger years.

However, this way of thinking makes an important aspect out of eight: eligible vehicles often lack essential safety technologies. And so, driver assistance systems that support mainly in complex and sophisticated traffic situations would adequately slowly hold into the vehicle inventory of the seniors, as DEBRA accident researcher Walter Niewöhner says.

Assistance systems help

Especially older motorists, however, benefit in a special extent of the electronic helpers. A reversing camera, for example, can spare the view over the shoulder, to make parking assistants facilitate the parking and out parks, modern night view systems recognize and warn not only before factual obstacles, but also from pedestrians, wheels and animals, emergency brake systems can beat alarm at collision hazard alarm, support emergency braking and possibly even brake independently. Also, a Navy serves risk minimization — it is all safer to let a friendly voice and arrows on the screen through a foreign city, as the road map in hand to trust.

Connection occupied

The connection between vehicle age, age of the driver and accident risk proves statistical numbers: In 2019, nearly 50 percent of the accidents in which a car was involved in less than one year in Germany. With increasing vehicle age, this value increases, with cars of twelve and more years, it is already 59.4 percent. Especially with seniors and at least twelve years old cars, he is even at 70 percent.

The figures make it clear that developments in vehicle technology are quite the potential to reduce the number of accidents as a whole and also the risk of accidents with personal injury, the DEBRA sums up.

Vehicle stock ages

The vehicle inventory in Germany is generally increasingly aging: the average age of a car in 2001 was still 7.1 years, it was already 9.8 years at the beginning of 2021. In the opinion of the accident researchers, this slows down a decline of those accidents in which persons are harmed.