What's the chance for one to die in a car accident in their life-time? [closed]

Question

Considering the high number of car accidents, it must be around 5%, right?

Answer 1

I would also point out that there's going to be tremendous variation in risk across individuals due to substantial variation in exposure.

Police officers, for example, are at a very high risk because they drive around all day everyday and, in addition to that, are sometimes involved in risky high speed chases. Police officers are actually more likely to be killed in a car accident than by gunshot.

I say this merely to point out that looking at aggregate rates probably tells us little about actual individual risk, which may or may not be the number you actually care about. Things like miles driven per year, region/locale, and driving style (including seatbelt use) probably change your actual risk substantially.

This is my long winded way of warning you not to commit the ecological fallacy.

Answer 2

Statistics on cause of death, by country, are collated by the World Health Organization from national reports. I couldn't find a good summary on their site for this answer but the data are there somewhere; there is a summary in Wikipedia. Worldwide, 2.1 percent of deaths are reported there to be from road traffic accidents, in 2001 at least.

As the other answers and comments suggest, this doesn't mean any one individual's probability is 0.021, but this would be your starting point for estimating the probability for a world citizen about whom you know nothing other than their existence.

Answer 3

I don't know what the actual probability is. But I am certain it's way, way less than 5%. Five percent would mean that 1 person out of 20 would end up dying this way! If you need to know the real number, there are some registries that compile the causes of death and clearly the answer is there, somewhere.

Otherwise, you can try to estimate it. One way to approach it (not very rigorous but it's an interesting exercise) is to think of how many, among all the people you know, have been killed in a car accident. Odds are there are none or very few. I know none. And as all human beings I know quite a lot of people. Now a step further: think of how many people you know (people for which you would have known if they had been killed in a car accident). This gives you a gross denominator by which you can divide your numerator (# of people who died in a crash).

Note that this is sensitive to the age of the person doing the exercise (as you get older, you have more and more chance of knowing someone who died in a car crash... Although at the same time, the number of people you know also gets higher).

Finally, if I were to risk a number, I'd say less than 0.1%. But this relies on a personal, subjective evaluation to be taken with a grain of salt.