You don't want to have one but chances are that you will, especially while you're young and inexperienced but how do you best avoid one or reduce the ‘impact’ if you do?

Primary Safety – avoiding having an accident
Remaining in control of your car is down to you the driver and how it reacts to what you’re asking it to do. If you expect your car to do the impossible and get you out of trouble, then not surprisingly it won't. There are systems such as Anti-lock Brakes (ABS) and Electronic Stability Control systems (ESC) that can improve your chances but being aware of what's happening and knowing when and how to react are your best way of staying in control.

ABS, as the name implies, uses clever electronics to stop the wheels from locking when you apply the brakes harder than the tyres can deliver, which causes the car to skid. This lengthen the distance you need to stop but also critically takes away your ability to steer the car. ABS only became a legal requirement in Europe in 2005.

ESC uses more electronics and can reduce engine torque in addition to applying brake pressure to individual wheels to help control a slide . See some ESC explantion videos here.

There's a move to make ESC a legal requirement but this won't happen before 2011. The European vehicle safety assessment body, EuroNCAP, have announced that it will be only give its full 5-star rating to cars with ESC fitted as standard to the majority of the model range.

Secondary Safety - giving you the best chance in an accident
Although the numbers are falling in the UK, far too many people still die or are seriously injured in accidents involving cars. Car manufacturers have greatly increased ‘survivability’ by improvements in energy absorbing body design and technologies such are seat-belts and air-bags.

The most common type of accident is a frontal impact (not surprising really as this is the direction most people want to travel) and this has focused improvements on the front of the vehicle.

• Crash structures - careful design to reduce the peak deceleration your body has to endure and to reduce intrusions into the passenger compartment.
• Seat-belts - to stop you hitting the things in front of you and correctly position your body for the airbag to function most effectively. Not wearing a seat-belt or having it incorrectly positioned ( off your shoulder, for example) is just asking for trouble…
• Air-bags - most cars produced in the last few years will have one in the steering wheel for the driver, many have one in the fascia in front of the front-seat passenger and some have them in the doors or in the sides of the seats. They attempt to cushion you from the hard things around you. There is a misconception that an airbag will hurt you when it goes off but you won't even notice it as it's all over in about 1/10th of a second, you'll be having an accident at the time and it hurts a whole lot more without one .

Side impacts are the next most common type of accidents, either due to a car impacting the side of your car or you sliding into something hard. This has led to the design of side-impact intrusion structures in the doors and side airbags, though the latter are not that common in cheaper cars yet.

Crash testing has evolved over the last 40 years, cars are now much safer than they used to be but crash tests can only cover a small number of crash scenarios and are used to compare the performance of different cars.

A comparison of 'old' versus 'new' has been conducted by the TV programme Fifth Gear, in which a old Volvo estate was crashed into a new Renault Modus. That showed just how good modern car designs are - even the small ones. Handily, somebody has put the clip on YouTube.

So all-in-all, buying the newest design of car you can afford seems like a pretty good idea....

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A SAFE ACCIDENT
Click here to see how bad it can be....… and another really scary one

These cars that have never been sold in the UK and this is about as bad as it can get - again, thank you YouTube.

The best place to compare the crash performance of cars made after 1996 is at the EuroNCAP website. Most, but not all, big sellers are there. Currently EuroNCAP score crash performance with maximum of 5 stars for driver and passenger safety and pedestrian impact but there are moves to change this to a maximum of 6, to encourage further improvement.