Enlarge / The Waze crash history alerts look like this. (credit: Waze)

Traffic navigation app Waze is adding a new feature to its toolbox today. It's called crash history alerts, and it's meant to warn drivers about dangerous hotspots, based on a combination of historical data plus road and traffic data.

Originally an independent startup, in 2013 Google purchased the Israeli company for $1.15 billion, perhaps beating Apple to the punch . Even before the purchase, Waze was becoming an Ars reader favorite thanks to more advanced traffic rerouting than either Google Maps or Apple Maps.

It has not been entirely smooth sailing driving; for a while the app was infamous for asking drivers to make difficult left turns across busy multi-lane roads and routing cars through once-quiet neighborhoods as shortcuts , aggravating the people who live in those neighborhoods.

Enlarge (credit: Mercedes-Benz)

Mercedes-Benz provided flights from New York to Stuttgart, Germany, and a night in a hotel so Alex could visit the Mercedes test facility on the way to a drive event (for a different publication). Ars does not accept paid editorial content.

Something unexpected happened as I looked down to watch two Mercedes-Benz EVs crash into each other: I felt… scared.

It was the culmination of a day spent with Mercedes-Benz discussing the company's plans to fully prevent serious injuries in its vehicles and the first time an automaker publicly conducted a crash test between two EVs, in this case with a select group of journalists in attendance. Witnessing two cars smash into each other would be, at the very least, very exciting.

But I didn't expect to feel my stomach drop in the moment of impact and the dread that lingered after. The experience hammered home the importance of all the safety measures automakers implement in the cars we spend our lives with and how much work goes into engineering the successful outcomes we hope we never have to experience firsthand.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Not all vehicle occupants are protected equally when it comes to car crashes. Until 2017, cars weren't even routinely crash-tested on the passenger side , just the driver's. There's still other low-hanging fruit, too; thousands of rear-seat passengers die in cars each year in the United States because they're not wearing seat belts, despite decades of evidence on the effectiveness of buckling up. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has now had enough and has proposed a new rule that would mean new cars, trucks, and even some buses would need to have seat belt warning alerts for all occupants, not just the driver.

Seat belts have been mandatory equipment for all seats in cars and trucks (but not buses) since 1968, thanks to the US Department of Transport. But the US has lagged behind much of the world when it comes to requiring their use; this is determined at the state level, and it wasn't until 1984 that New York became the first US state to require seat belt use.

Since then , 48 other states, along with the District of Columbia, now require front seat occupants to wear belts—New Hampshire remains unconvinced—but a total of 10 states don't require rear passengers to wear seat belts by law.

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America was a dangerous place to be a pedestrian in 2022. Preliminary data analyzed by the Governors Highway Safety Association (GSHA) found that 7,508 pedestrians were killed in traffic crashes last year, the highest number of deaths since 1981. But the carnage is very unevenly distributed; 26 states and the District of Columbia actually became safer for pedestrians during 2022, and the nationwide year-on-year increase in pedestrian traffic deaths was just 1 percent. Overall, there was a 0.3 percent reduction in fatal vehicle crashes in the US last year.

The last few years have seen an alarming rise in pedestrian fatalities. In 2010, 4,302 pedestrians were killed by US traffic, accounting for 13 percent of all traffic deaths. But by 2021, the number of pedestrian deaths had increased by 77 percent to 7,624.

You might have noticed that's actually a little higher than the number that the GSHA is projecting for 2022; Oklahoma was apparently unable to provide 2022 data, and the data reported by the State Highway Safety Offices is usually about 2 percent greater than the data in the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's Fatality Analysis Reporting System. Therefore the 2021 number for comparison, excluding Oklahoma, was 7,443 pedestrians.

Enlarge / Emergency braking systems have been on the road for some years, but now the federal government wants them to be mandatory equipment on all new light trucks and passenger cars. (credit: Volvo)

On Wednesday, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration issued a notice of proposed rulemaking that would see automatic emergency braking become a standard feature on all new light passenger vehicles. If adopted, NHTSA says it would save 360 lives and prevent 24,000 crashes each year.

"Today, we take an important step forward to save lives and make our roadways safer for all Americans," Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said. “Just as lifesaving innovations from previous generations like seat belts and airbags have helped improve safety, requiring automatic emergency braking on cars and trucks would keep all of us safer on our roads."

NHTSA added automatic emergency braking to its list of recommended safety features in 2015 . At the time, it started noting the presence or absence of this advanced driver assistance system when determining a car's rating under the New Car Assessment Program (NCAP), which is aimed at giving consumers safety information about new vehicles.

Enlarge / The Tesla Model Y earned a good rating in IIHS' rear seat protection crash test. (credit: IIHS)

Only four of 13 midsize SUVs earned good ratings when it came to protecting rear-seat passengers in an impact, according to new crash tests performed by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. Of that 13, two were battery-electric vehicles—the Ford Mustang Mach-E and Tesla Model Y—and both achieved good ratings, as did the Ford Explorer and Subaru Ascent.

The IIHS has been crash-testing cars at its Vehicle Research Center in Virginia since the early 1990s after noticing that most head-on collisions were offset, something the federal government's crash tests did not account for. Since then, the organization has added several other crash tests that car manufacturers are eager to pass in order to earn a coveted "Top Safety Pick" rating.

The IIHS updated its moderate overlap front crash test in 2022 after becoming frustrated that front-seat safety gains made by the industry have not been shared with those sitting in the back of a car.

Enlarge (credit: Wayne Eastep/Getty Images)

Women and older people are being failed by our crash test dummies, according to the US Government Accountability Office. The GAO has just published a new report on the topic and is concerned that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has not done enough to fill knowledge or research gaps that would make our vehicles safer for those more-vulnerable classes of occupants. Consequently, the GAO is recommending that NHTSA create a comprehensive plan to improve that crash test dummy data.

There's no question that cars today are safer than they were even two decades ago. In addition to the crash testing required by the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards (FVMSS), programs like NHTSA's New Car Assessment Program (NCAP) and the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety's Top Safety Picks publicize their test scores, which has forced manufacturers to improve occupant protection to get those all-important safety scores, and now cars have to be designed to deal with offset collisions, side impacts, and rollovers, as well as head-on crashes.

But the benefits of improved in-car safety have been mostly seen by men.