&gt; The language &quot;accident&quot; (and the associated story) implies that one cannot control whether they injure someone with their 2000lb death machines. That is not true.<p>It&#x27;s an accident because it&#x27;s not on purpose. If you intentionally kill your ex with your car then people don&#x27;t call it an accident.<p>Moreover, there are less than 5000 pedestrian fatalities per year in the US, and the reason there are that many is that US drivers drive three trillion miles a year. That&#x27;s less than one pedestrian fatality for every 600 million miles. At 12,000 miles a year it would take more than 50,000 years before the average driver would kill one pedestrian. And that isn&#x27;t doing any accounting for the cases where the pedestrian was at fault.<p>Most drivers never kill anyone. And that remains true even though almost all drivers are idiots at least some of the time. Because to kill someone you have to be an idiot <i>and</i> be in exactly the wrong place at exactly the wrong time. But you can&#x27;t control random chance, which is why we have insurance.