1635 D. Person Varieties iii. 155 Such autocides and selfe murtherers.

1992 R. Martin in A. Robbe-Grillet et al. Autobiographie & Avant-garde 357 [B. S. Johnson] killed himself at the age of forty-two. The autobiographer as autocide.

1923 Daily Independent (Monessen, Pa.) 9 Nov. 2/4 As civilization advances and science finds new ways to prolong life nature finds new ways to end it, the latest and most effective of which is autocide.

1931 Sun (Baltimore) 21 Oct. 14 The National Safety Council of the United States of America, which is said to have been searching for a suitable term to cover ‘motor-vehicle fatalities’, may think that it has found a very nice one in the selected word ‘autocide’.

1967 Time 10 Mar. 19 No one can know for sure, but more and more police and traffic experts suspect that ‘autocide’, as one expert calls it, is an important cause of traffic death.

1988 E. A. Grollman Suicide (ed. 2) i. 8 People who attempt autocide rarely leave suicide notes.

2008 Weekend Austral. (Nexis) 16 Aug. (Review section) 6 George Miller explains the genesis of Mad Max in his confrontation with ‘autocide’ as a doctor in emergency wards stitching up the carnage of car accidents.

1928 Sunday Times-Signal (Zanesville, Ohio) 2 Dec. i. 4/3 I admit with shame that this tax drove men the other day to the verge of autocide, or whatever they call the operation of forcibly ending the life of a car.

1966 SF Impulse Aug. 120 I killed a car. I don't know what the legal term for that would be. Autocide perhaps.

1980 Washington Post (Nexis) 18 Jan. b5 I found a junk yard with a car that had committed autocide by ramming into something large and immovable.

1987 New Republic 3 Aug. 18/2 In the..speech, Jackson recalled the ‘guy in Chicago [who] lost his job and shot a Toyota six times—autocide’.

2008 Analog Sci. Fiction & Fact May 103/2 The cars intend to commit suicide or autocide or something. We've got to stop it.

1967 Jrnl. Agric. (Victoria Dept. Agric.) 65 324/2 If thousands or millions of the Queenslanders [sc. Queensland crickets] were introduced at mating time to limited populations of Victorian crickets, the lethal genes of the intruders would set going the terrible process of autocide.

1987 D. S. Hill Agric. Insect Pests Temperate Regions iv. 62 Generally, autocide is most effective when applied to restricted populations (islands, etc.) but can be effective on parts of the continents.

2001 A. Unger et al. Conservation of Wood x. 355 The autocide method (sterilization of male insects) is another possibility.