about a deadly car crash at speeds

alleged to be over 100 miles per hour.

A man is dead after being hit by a car in Midtown.

It's just tragic.

The crash happened on the 10 Freeway in Fontana

killing four people.

Investigators tell us there is a possibility

that this was the result of a DUI.

Eye witnesses say it appeared the driver didn't realize

he had struck the boy and his mother until it was too late.

These are only a few of the estimated 38,800 deaths

on American streets in 2019.

And possibly even more tragically,

we actually have the technology

to prevent many of those deaths.

We're just not using it.

This is David Zipper.

He's a visiting fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School

and first wrote about this technology for CityLab.

What is the risk for people in the United States

for car fatalities?

What has been the trend there?

Well, it's not been good.

In the last decade in America,

overall road and street fatalities

have been relatively flat,

but that masks some big differences.

If you're inside of an automobile,

it's actually gotten safer.

Fatalities have gone down over the last decade

but they've spiked for pedestrians and for cyclists,

between 30% and 45% over the last decade.

And meanwhile, if you compare the United States

to other OECD countries, other Western countries

especially in Europe, we're doing much worse.

In Helsinki, Finland last year

there were literally zero deaths.

And those risks are not spread out evenly.

In fact, those most likely to be killed

as a cyclist or a pedestrian, they tend to be minorities,

they tend to be elderly, they often are low income.

So, this is actually an equity issue as much as a safety one.

Many city governments have worked hard

to address these issues, adopting safer street initiatives

around improving crosswalks and lowering speed limits.

But those measures can only go so far.

The reality is when two tons of glass, metal and plastic

hit 150 pounds of flesh and bone,

it's the human who's going to lose every single time.

This is another David, David Friedman,

and he's the Vice President for Advocacy

at Consumer Reports.

You know, one of the things we just did recently

was we put out a report that pointed out

that we could actually

cut the roadway fatalities in half

with technologies that are already out there today.

Well, let's talk about speed.

In a big country like the United States,

speed sells, people like it,

and car companies play off of those sorts of ideas

that an automobile lets you go quickly and independently.

I'm reminded of an advertisement for the Dodge Charger

that I saw myself

when I was watching the Super Bowl a few years ago.

It's a wonderful thing, this game.

It really plays on these ideas of being American.

To bring an entire nation together.

And being loyal.

Glorious moment in time.

We are thankful,

mainly because the streets

are just empty as hell right now.

It was really striking to me.

And I think it is very revealing

about how automobiles sell this concept of speed,

urban speed in particular, through their products.

I mean, when you sort of look back at history,

the automobile really showed up in American cities.

It changed the speed of the street.

That's Seleta Reynolds.

All right, let's do it.

She's the General Manager

for the Los Angeles Department of Transportation

and as she explains, lowering the speed of vehicles

can dramatically shift fatality rates.

If you are hit by a car

that is traveling 20 miles an hour or slower,

you have a 80% to 90% chance of surviving that crash

if you're on foot.

Once that car is going 40 miles an hour,

your chance of surviving that crash

plummets down to about 20%.

Cities throughout the United States

have been really trying to keep

especially vulnerable pedestrians and cyclists safe

by reducing speed limits

or encouraging drivers to go slower.

The problem is that they can violate that speed limit.

However, there is a technological solution,

a simple device called a speed governor or a speed limiter.

The speed governors have been around

for literally over a century.

Today, you can have a speed governor that is pretty simple,

saying the vehicle can never go above 40 miles an hour,

or you can have a quote unquote smart speed governor

that would adjust to the surrounding speed limit.

Are there any laws in the books

or is there any government action

to sort of put these in cars?

Well, no.

The United States, there's really been no effort

to require or even encourage speed limiters,

speed governors to be installed on personal vehicles.

In Europe, regulators have been more aggressive.

All new vehicles bought and sold in the European Union

from the year 2022 will have to be fitted

with so-called intelligent speed assistance technology.

The speed governors there are gonna be smart

in that they will use data

from a variety of different sources

to adjust based on what the surrounding speed limit is.

But, and this may end up being a big but,

a driver will be able to overcome the limit

by keeping a foot pressed down on the accelerator.

That may be helpful for a driver who wants to, say,

get around a truck on the highway,

but it does open questions about just how much protection

will be afforded to pedestrians and cyclists

from a truly reckless driver.

But there are technologies out there

that can help prevent some of the most dangerous drivers

from ever even taking the wheel.

A woman suspected of driving under the influence

is dead this morning after driving.

Many roadway fatalities occur

within a quarter mile of a pub, bar, drinking establishment,

which means either the driver or the pedestrian,

or sometimes both have been impaired.

This is Greg Winfree,

the director of the Texas A&M Transportation Institute

and he points to one maybe obvious technology,

the breathalyzer.

Breathalyzers are typically used to ensure compliance

from folks that have been convicted

of a drunk driving offense.

You know, so there's stigma.

Would I want to voluntarily put in my vehicle

a device that to a passer-by

might say this guy is a DUI guy?

The auto industry with some regulators

has been developing some new technologies

in a program called DADSS, or D-A-D-S-S

that would actually look at a driver's breath

or their touch on the steering wheel

to be able to passively determine

if there's alcohol in their system.

And then frankly they wouldn't be able

to operate the vehicle.

That technology is still a few years away.

But there's other types of technology being developed

as well that have a similar goal.

These technologies fall into what are known

as driver monitoring systems

and they can detect more than just drunk drivers.

Some of them can keep an eye on your eyes

and figure out whether or not

you've got your eyes on the road

and/or whether or not you're doing proper scanning,

so that it knows that you're consciously engaged

in the driving task.

So these sorts of driver monitoring systems

are still quite rare

and they're really put only onto luxury vehicles.

So the vast majority of vehicles sold today

and for the foreseeable future aren't going to have them.

Yeah, you know, the only exposure I've ever had

to this kind of technology is there's these Subaru ads

right now, where parents are kind of worried

about their phone-addicted teens out driving

and getting into these sort of horrific accidents.

Parents have a way of imagining the worst.

Automakers are trying to differentiate themselves

with the quality of their safety technology.

There's another one that Honda did a couple of years ago

about a guy named Mark.

Mark is the best husband and father you could ask for.

Who is praised by lots of people.

Great guy, best man at my wedding.

Just got to keep him off the dance floor.

And then it shows Mark crossing a street

and he's not really paying attention

and he's almost hit by a Honda,

but the Honda uses its pedestrian detection system

to spot him and the driver stops in time.

Pedestrian detection systems are one version

of, sort of like a broad category of safety technologies

known as advanced driver assistance systems or ADAS

Engaging green light.

Oh my God.

Automatic emergency braking.

Smart cruise control or adaptive cruise control.

Lane assist.

All of those are ADAS systems.

Those are all important safety features

when you're thinking about cars

operating in higher speed, simpler environments

but they are almost useless

when you're talking about vehicles

that are operating in complicated urban environments.

AAA did a study recently showing

that they're highly suspect

when detecting a pedestrian at night,

or when the vehicle is making a right-hand turn.

They do a really poor job

even detecting adult pedestrians.

Only detecting adult pedestrians about 60% of the time

and then when it comes to smaller pedestrians and children,

they hardly detected them at all.

In another study, AAA also found

that other ADAS technology like lane assist

and adaptive cruise control were simply unreliable.

Over 4,000 miles of driving,

researchers encountered an issue about every eight miles.

And I assume this technology,

along with any other technology,

it'll only get better over time.

But I'm curious with this technology already out there

who's really pressuring these car companies

to improve it, to make it better?

As of now, really no one.

This is all voluntary work

that's being done by the automakers.

Some of them really do invest a lot of money

and effort in it, some don't, but it's really up to them.

The shoulder belt and lap belt are now combined

so that one buckle secures both belts.

The reason we have seatbelts,

the reason we have antilock brakes

is because it was mandated by the government.

Historically however, government action around safety

often faces backlash, both by automakers and drivers.

It's always been a struggle

to get safety technology into automobiles.

It took decades to make airbags,

which are commonplace today, be mandatory.

In 1974, the federal government tried to impose

what's called a safety belt interlock.

So you couldn't turn on your car

if you weren't wearing a safety belt

and within a year, auto interests and drivers were so irate

that they forced Congress to backpedal.

So there's a long history of challenges made,

sometimes from drivers,

oftentimes from auto companies themselves.

Multiple carmakers and the automaker lobbying group