New cars are helping to minimize fatalities and injuries

Last year, DPS logged more than 1,700 wrong-way driving incidents statewide. While not all of them are fatal, a wrong way head-on crash kills someone about 25% of the time.

While new cars are helping to minimize the number of fatalities and injuries, some questions still remain:

In the moments before a crash, what can one do? What do one think about? Can one even react?

"They were either driving in that lane or they veered into the lane, and they actually hit a truck in front of us, spun around and then we hit them head on," said Susan Wissink, who survived a car crash.

Wissink didn't have time to do anything. Her husband was driving, and she was riding along as they made their way up to Colorado for a vacation. That was all Wissink remembers before the accident that happened 3.5 years ago.

"I suffered a severe concussion, so I don't remember the 15 minutes up to the accident," said Wissink. "I remember that day when I came to and was being loaded into the helicopter, so I remember from that point forward, but the accident itself I don't recall. It was a horrible experience to wake up, I knew something was wrong. the inside of the helicopter actually said "Flight for life"."

In the aftermath, Wissink could only think of her children.

"When I came to, I didn't know what had happened, but I knew if I was in a helicopter, it wasn't good, and I knew I was with my husband that day, and I didn't know if he was alive. We have 3 children and I literally just prayed that one of us was alive, so our children wouldn't be orphans." said Wissink.

Surviving that crash, or crashes like the one that happened at the end of a pursuit in January, might have seemed unlikely in years past, but deaths from car crashes are dropping.

"There was something like 50,000 deaths per year in 1980, and it's dropped to a low of about 33,000 in 2014," said Michael Ciccone, senior director of crash worthiness at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety in Rickersville, Virginia.

The IIHS has been evaluating car safety for almost 60 years, and Ciccone has seen plenty of changes in his nearly four decades with the group.

"When I started in 1979, cars had lap and shoulder belts in the front seats, but they still for the most part had only lap belts in the rear seats, and airbags were essentially non existent," said Ciccone.

The impressive facility is a shrine to tested cars, displaying how well (or not so well) the vehicles performed. It's also not just running a car into a wall. There's a science to everything, starting with the crash test dummies.

"I'm actually putting this dummy together right now, he's been instrumented," said Marvin Hatchett, who calibrates the dummies before testing. "The dummies, they are definitely the surrogates for humans, and what they would experience in a crash test, and we have to ensure they operate exactly how they are designed."

Dummies with articulating spines and vertebrae populate the area. Once ready, however, they're not just thrown in the car.

There's a method to that as well.

"It takes quite a bit, probably three to four days in vehicle prep, photography, prepping and draining fluids, getting the vehicle ready, doing all the measurements, before I even get to it they have the seats set, the steering wheel set," said Tyler Ayres, a senior engineering technician.

The dummies are then painted. After a crash test, the marks help paint a better picture about potential injuries an actual human might face. On a day FOX 10's Matt Galka was visiting the facility, the group was testing a new Volkswaagen Atlas SUV. Car manufacturers usually look to the IIHS to tout safety features on their vehicles, and Becky Mueller helped design that day's test, focusing on the passenger

"We discovered that manufacturers weren't always putting the same safety improvements on the driver side and the passenger side in the small overlap test," said Mueller.

The car will speed down a runway at 40 mph, and ram a barrier on one side. Ideally, the passenger side won't crumble.

"We're looking at the structure of the car, we want space around the occupant so they have room to survive in a crash," said Mueller.

The brand new car, outfitted with dummy's and instruments , made its way towards the barrier with no brakes. The group will eventually rate the car on a good, acceptable, marginal, or poor scale, but they get almost instant feedback.

"As you can see, both the drivers in blue and the passenger in pink have all their measures within good, suggesting that this dummy, with this crash, would have a low risk of injury," said Mueller.

The group also tests other features, like autonomous braking and self parking, all in the hopes of reducing risk on the roads.

For Wissink, however, her crash was fatal for the at-fault driver. It will always stay with her.

"It is difficult. I still am a skiddish passenger," said Wissink. "I'm nervous when someone brakes suddenly or loud noises like that when we're driving."

Should something happens to you or a loved one, Fennemore Craig personal injury attorney Marc Lamber says don't go it alone, especially if the crash is serious.

"It's also important to recognize there's a whole legal system, so that may mean you need to preserve evidence," said Lamber. "The car may be evidence. The markings on the roadway. There may be witnesses who saw and may move, so I think it's really important to make sure you have people helping you."

"I don't see our mission going away anytime. unless we actually get the death rate down to zero," Ciccone.

For it's 50th anniversary back in 2009, IIHS put a 1959 Chevrolet Bel Air against a 2009 Chevrolet Malibu in a crash test. While Bel Air looks like a tank, the crash test showed that the driver of the 1959 vehicle most likely would have been killed, while the driver of the Malibu would likely have survived.