You wake up one morning to find the roads blanketed in a thick carpet of snow. It's still too early for the snowplows to have gotten around to your small neighborhood, but you have to get to work on time this morning. You're a little nervous about the commute, but you get in your car and begin your drive anyway.
After a little while with no mishaps, you grow more confident and inch back up to your usual speed. The radio is playing your favorite song, and the traffic conditions have you convinced that you won't be late. But now you're traveling down a hill toward a stoplight, and when you apply the brakes, you can feel that something's wrong. You're not coming to a smooth stop. Instead, you're slipping, and now the bumper of the car in front of you is alarmingly close -- right before you crash into it.
You've just become another of the more than 1.5 million annual car crashes associated with poor driving conditions caused by weather. These lousy driving conditions lead to an estimated 7,000 people being killed each year and 800,000 more injured.
