According to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, more accommodations need to be put into place for older drivers. In order to keep the elderly safe while on the road, there need to be more air bags in new cars and stop signs need to be made larger to help those with poorer vision to read them. These measures can have big consequences on the survival rate of elderly drivers who get into car accidents, and can lessen the amount of accidents among them as a whole. These measures need to be taking, considering how the population of the United States is shifting towards being older more than younger. Twenty years from now, the number of elderly drivers on the road will be forty million.
The age of drivers has long been a factor in car insurance premiums, and with good reason. Younger drivers are more likely to be reckless and less knowledgeable of the road. The, between being a young driver and a senior citizen, there are a number of years where driving skills peak before slowly declining. Older drivers have an increased likelihood of getting in car accidents and dying from them. A lot of this can be fixed just by making things bigger so that senior citizens can see them noticeably and clearly.
Graduated license laws are currently in place to try to help avoid senior citizen crashes. These laws require that older people be tested on their driving every couple of years to make sure that they are still up to driving on the road. These haven’t worked so well, though, and the IIHS suggest that its ideas make more sense because the problem with the elderly isn’t just vision but delayed reaction. Cars should change, too, to be made more safe for these frailer bodies.
The safety measures for the vehicles could help kids as well as senior citizens, which makes it doubly successful. What they should do, according to the IIHS, is make the air bags adjustable. This way, if a senior citizen buys the car, the air bags can be set to deploy less forcefully so as to avoid injuries from that. Then, as for the seat belts, in some cars they can have a little more slack to avoid things like breaking ribs. A few companies, like Ford, are ahead of the game in this area and have already started releasing vehicles that fit the description.
The ISO found that it was a bad idea a few years ago to give drivers over seventy five a low mileage discount, considering that they actually do belong into a higher risk group for car insurance. The ISO didn’t say to take away the discount entirely, but to knock off about twenty percent, because elderly drivers experience more losses than other groups do when they get into car accidents.
Insurance rates are going up for older drivers because of these reasons. Research shows that they are more likely to crash and more likely to suffer fatalities, so it is legally okay to raise premiums for people in that group, and most insurance companies have over the last few years raised their rates.
Cheers,
Fashun Guadarrama.
