I've written frequently about how driving fatalities are the leading cause of death for people from age 5 to 45, and one of the leading overall causes of death. I write this because we hope that safe robocars, with a much lower accident rate, can eliminate much of this death.

Today I sought to calculate the toll in terms not of lives, but in years of life lost. Car accidents kill people young, while the biggest killers like heart disease/stroke, cancer and respiratory disease kill people when they are older. The CDC's injury prevention dept. publishes a table of "Years of Potential Life Lost" which I have had it calculate for a lifespan of 80 years. (People who die after 80 are not counted as having lost years of life, though a more accurate accounting might involve judging the average expected further lifespan for each age cohort and counting that as the YPLL.)

The core result of the table though is quite striking. Auto accidents jump to #3 on the list from #7, and the ratios become much smaller. While each year almost a million die from cardiovascular causes and 40,000 from cars, the ratio of total years lost is closer to 4 to 1 for both cardiovascular disease and cancer, and the other leading causes are left far behind. (The only ones to compete with the cars are suicides and accidental poisoning which is much worse than I expected.)

The lesson: Work on safe robocars is even more vital than we might have thought, if you use this metric. It also seems that those interested in saving years of life may want to address the problem of accidental poisoning. Perhaps smart packaging or cheap poison detection could have a very big effect. (Update: This number includes non-intentional drug overdoses and deaths due to side effects of prescription drugs.) For suicide, this may suggest that our current approaches to treating depression need serious work. (For example, there are drugs that have surprising effectiveness on depression such as ketamine which are largely unused because they have recreational uses at higher doses and are thus highly controlled.) And if you can cure cancer, you would be doing everybody a solid.

Note: Stillbirths are not counted here. I would have expected the Perinatal causes to rank higher due to the large number of years erased. If you only do it to 65, thus counting what might get called "productive years" the motor vehicle deaths take on a larger fraction of the pie. Productivity lost to long term disability is not counted here, though it is very common in non-fatal motor vehicle accidents. Traffic deaths are dropping though so the 2009 figures will be lower.