With 16 times as many miles driven by all cars and still only 33,000 fatalities, driving must be proportionately a lot safer.
The same has happened in the airline industry, where the switch away from piston engines and high octane gas, as well as Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM), plus better air safety standards, has dramatically reduced the number of crashes and fatalites per 100,000,000 miles traveled.
My original post asks for what factors you guys believe are most important. That’s what some of the variables are!
The above post is an attempt to show that there are likely 10 times as many cars on the road today (not 100 times), driven probably 50% more miles per year each.
One factor not mentioned so far is the fact that in 1950 the US car fleet was considerably older, since there was no car production from late 1942 to 1946, and the car fleet on average had a lot of miles and wear on it.