People often have a set of common fears that, while they don’t apply to everyone, do tend to apply to a large portion of the population. For example, there are many people who are afraid of flying. There are others who are afraid of swimming in the ocean because of shark attacks.
But most of these people are not afraid of driving. They probably commute to work every single day. Younger people may drive to school each day. America has an entire infrastructure built around motor vehicles. Most people use their car multiple times every 24 hours – usually without thinking about the risks at all.
40,000 lives
But the truth is that driving itself claims roughly 40,000 lives every single year. Beyond that, there are hundreds of thousands of people who sustain injuries, some that are incredibly severe and that will alter the course of their entire lives. There are thousands and thousands of car accidents each day, and they all happen to people who get in the car without ever expecting to be involved in a crash.
By contrast, there are almost no major aviation disasters in the United States in a given year. Some small planes may go down, but major airliners almost never do. Shark attacks take only five lives per year. It’s not that these things are not valid fears, but the odds that you will actually be involved in one of these events are massively smaller than the odds that you will be involved in a motor vehicle crash.
If you do get in a crash caused by another driver, that’s when you need to know how to seek financial compensation.