I'm about to confess to a crime. As some of you may know, I don't drive for various reasons nor do I have a license, for various other reasons. But a few years ago someone close to me was in a hospital and I had to drive to see him.

I got lost in that gray area between the NJ Turnpike and the Palisades Parkway. It's almost as if you have to take a U-turn in the fifth dimension in order to end up where you want to be. Then I saw this police barricade in front of me. I got scared and I was afraid they'd randomly pull me over and ask for my license, which was suspended at the time. I'd end up in jail with my car impounded. And, I have to admit, I was rushing home to finish a column, and I didn't want to be late.

Crime #1: So I made a sudden right turn to avoid the barricade. Then one of the cops standing in front of the barricade comes running over to me. I had to stop the car. "You have to be kidding me?" he said. "Do you know you're going the wrong way down a one-way street and you did it with about 15 cops standing right over there?" He pointed to the other cops. I said I didn't know that and I apologized. He asked for my license.

Crime #2: I said I had left my license at home. (The truth was: it was suspended thanks to a party I went to at Victor Niederhoffer's house. But that's another story.) "You have to be kidding me?" he said. "You're driving the wrong way down a one-way street and you have no license? Let me see the registration papers for the car." I had no idea what he was talking about. It wasn't my car but I had borrowed it for the trip. So I dug through a mountain of papers in the glove compartment and found something that looked right.

Crime #3:"Who is Lucy X?" (Name changed to protect the innocent.) He was looking at the name on the registration papers. Clearly my name was not Lucy. "She's my neighbor. I had to borrow the car." To which he responded: "You have no license. You're driving the wrong way down a one-way street. And for all I know this is a stolen car. Are you really serious? Are you lying to me about any of this?"

"No, sir. I'm telling you the whole truth. I had to visit a friend in the hospital and had to use this car. My license is at home. I just got lost." At last he said, "Ugh. You're lucky I have other things to do. This would be too much paperwork." And he let me go, but not before giving me specific instructions for getting on the Palisades Parkway that didn't involve time travel or quantum mechanics.

All of this is to say is that people are getting away with murder on the streets of the U.S. and the statistics are there to prove it. There were over 1 million auto-related deaths around the world this past year. The police are busy ticketing quality drivers who are driving 66 miles per hour on the NJ Turnpike but letting criminals like me go free and easy.

Next year there probably are going to be more deaths than last year. And the numbers are going to go up every year. How come? Because farmers are moving into the cities everywhere in the world. The Third World is merging with the First World, and urban areas are filling up. More inexperienced drivers in urban areas means more auto deaths. So one trend that is never going away, regardless of the economy, is the increased demand for auto-safety devices.

How do we play this? Check out Autoliv (ALV). Autoliv makes airbags, seatbelts and other auto safety devices. It deals with every automaker and sell its products in 28 different countries. It has 30% market share in the auto safety industry and it is probably the leader in patents related to auto safety.

I like companies with a lot of patents on the books because those are real assets that the market essentially marks at zero (in fact, costs are usually associated with the R&D required to get a patent). The company is also giving back a ton of cash to shareholders. It pays a 3.2% dividend and has increased that dividend every year for the past six years. Furthermore, the company has bought back more than 25% of its shares in the past few years.

Finally Autoliv trades for only six times cash flows, and it has an excellent balance sheet. Its most recent patent application is for "airbag cushions with optional venting for out-of-position conditions." Good luck, guys. Save lives.