Every single day there are so many cars on the road. And up until recently all of those cars were being controlled by humans. Google and other big tech companies have already started testing out self-driving and robot cars, but I don’t think we’re even ready for this technology.

According to the research from Dayton, Ohio law firm The Brannon Law Firm there were an average of almost 16,000 car accidents per day across the US between 2005 and 2016. That sounds like a lot, but divided across the 50 states (320 daily), and tons of cities and towns (even less) — just think about how many car accidents (including small fender benders) you see each week while driving.

When you think about the roughly 150 million cars on the US streets each day, that is just a small percentage (0.01%). With all of these cars being controlled by humans — humans who now have smartphones and even more ways to easily be distracted than ever before — it’s kind of surprising that so many of us make it to our destination without any problems.

Back in the day the main distractions were the radio and billboards. Billboards are such a strange concept, especially today. You’re not supposed to be texting or reading on your phone, but it’s fine for some big company to pay a bunch of money to put some giant reading material to the side of the road for drivers?

Have you ever been driving on a crowded highway full of speeding cars and wondered How are we all doing this right now? Seriously, it’s like Olympic synchronized swimming*
— Click on the link!

It’s a miracle to see so many cars moving on the same multi-lane highway at such high speeds without everyone running into each other. The only thing keeping us from hitting each other is some paint on the ground which creates an imaginary lane for each car, and somehow that works.

Have you ever driven down a dark one lane highway, with cars headed in both directions, at night? This also makes no sense. You can’t even see what’s coming up ahead unless until right before it’s time to adjust. If there’s a car headed towards you with their headlights on, you can’t really see because they are blinding you.

Maybe you don’t think about these things and it’s just me. It didn’t start until recently. Maybe not driving much during the pandemic has made me appreciate driving on the highway a bit more. Anytime I drive on the highway these days I think, Wow, I haven’t been here in a while. Look at how fast I’m going! And from there I started thinking about the miracle of the highway and all of the cars working together.

If you haven’t thought about any of this then watch this last Olympic Synchronized Swimming video*. Seriously, this is just as impressive as what normal drivers are doing on the highway every single day.

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*Sorry, NBC doesn’t allow their Olympic videos to be posted directly to other sites, so I guess you’ll just have to follow the links to YouTube. I hope you enjoy these two videos and please, drive safely. Otherwise the robots will come steal all of our cars and no humans will be driving, ever again.