Forbes Autos posted a slideshow on the top 10 safety features on the horizon for cars. The accompanying article notes that the seat belt, made mandatory by Congress in the 1960s, inspired a revolutionary leap in automobile safety and dramatically reduced lives lost in crashes. Now they're trying to do the same thing again, this time with electronic stability control (ESC), saying that by 2011 it could save another 10,000 lives each year in the U.S. (The number of annual deaths in auto accidents has hovered in the 40,000 to 50,000 range over the past several decades).

New technologies such as collision mitigation, which uses radar to anticipate and avoid crashes, can help reduce those numbers even further, according to the report.

"I believe the most promising gains in highway safety are going to come from the deployment of crash-avoidance technologies," NHTSA administrator Nicole R. Nason said in the report. "Today the technology exists not only to ameliorate the severity of a crash, but to help prevent it outright." Among these technologies, Nason listed "forward-collision warning systems, lane-departure warning and blind-spot warning devices. [But] the crash-avoidance technology that holds the greatest promise is electronic stability control," she said. Check out the slideshow here.