By 2045, traffic accidents (which currently cause over 1 million deaths per year) will have virtually disappeared. In the United States, for example, the number will drop from 40.000 deaths per year to fewer than 250: almost all in rural or remote areas where the last human-driven cars are still on the road. Children born in 2025 will grow up in an accident-free world, where crashes are legends of the past, mistakes of a primitive era when humans controlled one-ton vehicles at 100 mph while perhaps glancing at their smartphones (another object that, perhaps, by 2045, will be forgotten). we will see much less or not at all).
The real revolution, however, won't be technological: it will be psychological. The generation born in 2025 will think radically differently about risk, responsibility, and what society must guarantee its citizens.
Accident-free: When human error disappears from the road
The change is already happening. Autonomous vehicles eliminate the human factor, that unpredictable variable that for decades has been the cause of 94% of road accidents. No more drowsiness at the wheel, no more drunk driving, no more distractions for a message that seemed urgent. Cars don't get tired, they don't argue with the passenger, they don't decide they can get through a yellow light. According to one National Highway Traffic Safety Administration study, Level 5 automated driving could reduce accidents by 99% within the next fifteen years.
In Italy, where according to the data ISTAT There are still over 3.000 road deaths each year; the transition to autonomous vehicles could bring this number down to below 50. As we have reported several times here on Futuro ProssimoThe technology is already there: LiDAR sensors, predictive artificial intelligence, real-time vehicle-to-vehicle communication. All that's missing is widespread deployment. And that will arrive sooner than we think.
The transition to autonomous vehicles will not be immediate, but progressive. Within the 2035Driverless cars will "attack" the roads. And by 2045, they will account for 70% of the fleet in Western cities. By 2040, in many parts of the world, driving manually will seem like a nostalgic hobby, like horseback riding today. The few remaining accidents will almost always involve old, human-controlled cars, relics of an era that refused to end.
The psychology of those who do not know random danger
Here's where the interesting part begins. Because a generation that grows up accident-free doesn't just drive differently: it thinks differently. Psychologists are already studying what it means for cognitive development to never be exposed to random tragedy. The children of 2025 will never see a parent tense up when another car swerves too close. They will never hear the siren of an ambulance racing toward a doomed intersection. They will never walk past a white cross tied to a guardrail.
For them, death by "bad luck" will not be normalIt will be an anomaly, a systemic flaw, something that shouldn't happen in an advanced society. And when you think like that, everything changes. If cars can be made 99,4% safe, why can't hospitals eliminate surgical errors? Why do construction sites still have workplace deaths? Why do factories still explode?
The accident-free generation will demand that every foreseeable danger be eliminated. Not as a wish: as moral obligation.
Fatalism, that resignation in the face of chance, will disappear. In its place will come an almost religious expectation (perhaps even pathological in certain forms, but more on that) of systemic perfection. And companies, governments, and institutions that fail to ensure it will be seen as negligent. A bit like how we now look at the Victorian factories that sent children into the mines without protection: technically possible, morally unacceptable.
What happens to a world without accidents?
The practical consequences are enormous. Insurance companies They will lose their core business model. Auto insurance, which currently generates billions, will become obsolete. Some will reinvent themselves as predictive risk analysis companies. A few will disappear. The emergency rooms, which currently devote most of their resources to road accident trauma, will completely reorganize. Fewer operating rooms for multiple trauma cases, more preventive diagnostics.
Cities will also change shape. If there are no more accidents, we no longer need three-meter-wide roadways for each lane. We don't need hypertrophic crash barriers. We don't need intersections designed to absorb the impact of cars traveling at 80 miles an hour. Roads can narrow, green spaces expand, sidewalks widen. Urban planning in 2040 will assume that no one crashes into anyone. And it will design accordingly.
The culture of mourning will also change. Cemeteries will lose one of their most painful categories: the graves of those who died young in an accident. Families will no longer have to live with that sense of utter absurdity, that "it just happened" that accompanies every road death. Without accidents, that kind of sudden loss will become rarer. And, of course, when it happens, it will seem even more unacceptable. Because if the system works 99,4%, that remaining 0,6% will feel like a betrayal.
The paradox of absolute security
As always, there's a dark side to consider. Previous generations will look back with a strange, almost embarrassing nostalgia. They'll remember when life seemed more "real," when risk informed daily choices. When getting into a car meant accepting a tiny but real margin of danger. The young people of 2045, obviously, will find this attitude incomprehensible. For them, allowing people to die from preventable causes It will seem as barbaric as allowing cholera to spread in drinking water when purification systems already exist.
This generation gap isn't new. It's happened to those who remember polio and those who never feared it. To those who knew hunger and those who can't even imagine it. But this time the divide runs deeper, because it concerns the very way we define the value of life. When you grow up in a world where accidental death has been removed from the equation, what's left of courage? Of the heroism of saving lives, when saving is no longer necessary?
Where the boundary of danger moves
The answer may be that human creativity is shifting from disaster response to disaster prevention. The "no accident" mentality will drive innovation towards predictive medicine, the infrastructures self-repairing, the security ecosystems imposed by artificial intelligence. The edge of danger will no longer be on the highways: it will be in deep space, in the ocean mines, in quantum computing laboratories where the stakes are intellectual, not mortal.
And maybe that's right. Maybe the idea that we had to accept a million deaths a year because "we know driving is dangerous" was just laziness disguised as realism. Maybe the accident-free generation will remind us that safety is not a luxury, is the basic operating system of a self-respecting civilization. And that every time we say “it’s always been this way,” we’re just admitting that we haven’t tried hard enough to change it.
In 2045, children born today won't just think that cars are safe. They'll think the world should be safe. And when an entire generation demands that every failure is unacceptable, the world has no choice but to adapt.
Or at least try.
