If someone told you that up to 37 million people are expected to die over the next 20 years in some particularly horrific way, you might think they were talking about the rise of a ghastly worldwide epidemic. In fact, that figure is the number of people that the World Health Organization and the World Bank have predicted will be killed in road accidents worldwide in the two decades to 2020. In the European Union alone, some 50 000 people die on the roads every year, which is the equivalent of two jumbo jets crashing every week killing everyone on board. The full impact of road accidents is actually worse than these figures suggest because for every fatality there are between an additional four and 12 seriously injured survivors. Thankfully, the shocking number of fatalities may, in fact, be less than predicted thanks to the efforts of engineers, bioscientists and even some physicists to make vehicles safer for both passengers and pedestrians alike. That work ranges from gaining a better understanding of the forces that the human body can withstand before an injury to developing technologies, such as car-mounted radar systems, that can prevent crashes occurring in the first place. Researchers are also designing new types of seat belts and airbags that function in different ways depending on the exact nature of the crash and the size and position of the passenger.

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