Cars were not "incredibly dangerous" when they first debuted because they topped out at about 40 mph (and went considerably slower most of the time). That's pretty comparable to a horse and carraige.
Yes they were. Besides the speed aspect, there were other things too.
For example, the hand crank was known to be fatal and pushed the founder of Cadillac, Henry Leland, to get it rid of it when it his friend was killed after helping a lady on the side of road.
Yeah, the danger posed by cars was initially limited because they had to share the road with lots of slower traffic (carts, bicycles, pedestrians etc. etc.). Only forbidding pedestrians from using the same space as cars enabled cars to become dangerous in the first place...
Also, horses were incredibly dangerous. In NYC in 1900 for example the pedestrian fatality rate from horses was higher than the NYC 2003 pedestrian fatality rate from cars [1].
Similarly in England and Wales deaths from horse-drawn vehicles were around 70 per 1 million people per year in the early 1900s. That's in the same ballpark as motor vehicle deaths in the 1980s and '90s (80-100 per 1 million people per year) [2].
(It should be noted that medical technology is better now. A lot of those 1900 fatalities would probably have been preventable if they had current medical technology).
A lot of people on HN seem to view the horse era as some sort of idyllic safe, quiet, and unobtrusive pedestrian and rider paradise. It was not. From that second article:
> It is easy to imagine that a hundred years ago, when cars were first
appearing on our roads, they replaced previously peaceful, gentle and safe
forms of travel. In fact, motor vehicles were welcomed as the answer to a
desperate state of affairs. In 1900 it was calculated that in England and
Wales there were around 100,000 horse drawn public passenger vehicles,
half a million trade vehicles and about half a million private carriages.
Towns in England had to cope with over 100 million tons of horse droppings
a year (much of it was dumped at night in the slums) and countless gallons
of urine. Men wore spats and women favoured outdoor ankle-length coats
not out of a sense of fashion but because of the splash of liquified
manure; and it was so noisy that straw had to be put down outside
hospitals to muffle the clatter of horses’ hooves. Worst of all, with
horses and carriages locked in immovable traffic jams, transport was
grinding to a halt in London and other cities.
and
> Motor vehicles were welcomed because they were faster, safer,
unlikely to swerve or bolt, better able brake in an emergency, and took up
less room: a single large lorry could pull a load that would take several
teams of horses and wagons – and do so without producing any dung. By
World War One industry had become dependent on lorries, traffic cruised
freely down Oxford Street and Piccadilly, specialists parked their
expensive cars ouside their houses in Harley and Wimpole Street, and the
lives of general practitioners were transformed. By using even the
cheapest of cars doctors no longer had to wake the stable lad and harness
the horse to attend a night call. Instead it was ‘one pull of the handle
and they were off’. Further, general practitioners could visit nearly
twice as many patients in a day than they could in the days of the horse
and trap.
