Based on official figures, one nation leads the world in car accidents. But unofficial figures tell a different story...
Dylan Campbell
05:5912 February 2024
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The United States of America has the unfortunate distinction of officially reporting the most annual car crashes of any country in the world.
In fact, it has four times as many car accidents each year as the next most crash-prone nation, Japan.
According to various official data sources, there were 1,949,000 car crashes in the United States in 2019, followed by 381,000 in Japan and 300,143 in Germany in the same period.
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The US figure could be much higher too. In 2021, according to the US Department of Transportation, police reported 6,102,936 car crashes across America – more than 11 car crashes every minute, of every day, that year. We presume this counts everything from a fatality to a minor bingle.
America's position as the top car-crashing nation is not entirely surprising given its love of cars, with 283,400,986 personal and commercial vehicles counted in official US Department of Transportation Highway Statistics in 2022 – and that's just the registered ones.
Americans also drive – a lot. In 2021, Americans drove a collective 5.19 trillion kilometres, according to the US Department of Transportation. Japan, by comparison, drove just 744 billion collective kilometres in 2019, according to data from the International Transport Forum.
America also has the largest road network in the world, 6,586,610km of road to be exact – 4,304,715km of which is paved. The paved distance alone is the equivalent of going to the moon and back, then looping around the earth 88 times.
As of 2015, Australia had 874,142km of paved and unpaved roads – just 13 per cent of what the US has.
What about car crashes in China and India?
That all said, there could be more car crashes each year in India or China than in the US, although it’s hard to know as reliable data is unavailable.
For starters, the US is no longer the country with the most registered cars in the world – that title now goes to China. For America’s 283 million registered vehicles, China has 415 million according to 2022 data from the Chinese government’s Ministry of Public Security.
However, China doesn’t report anywhere near the same amount of traffic accidents as the USA. Between 2010 and 2019, there were 2,125,994 traffic accidents according to official Chinese government sources –not that many more than the USA has in a single year.
That’s if you believe the official numbers, however. The World Health Organisation disputes China’s official annual road toll figures, estimating they are four times higher.
It’s also possible India has the most car crashes in the world but is unable to properly report it. In 2023, “at least” 168,491 people died in road crashes in India and 443,000 were injured. India accounts for 10 per cent of international car crash deaths despite having just one per cent of the world’s vehicles.
An estimated 42,795 people were killed in car accidents in the USA in 2022, so if the figure is three to four times higher in India, that suggests there are more crashes – or at least crashes in India are much deadlier.
How many car crashes are there in Australia per year?
As for Australia, no official figures for annual motor vehicle accidents exist, only crashes where people were injured are recorded.
Sadly, 1266 people died in motor vehicle accidents in Australia in 2023. With a population of just 26,638,544 people (as of June 2023) we are a tiny nation with comparatively minimal car accidents – despite what driving standards you might observe taking place in the average Australian city.
Road traffic incidents continue to be one of the leading causes of death in the world. According to data from the World Health Organisation, approximately 1.19 million people are killed each year in road traffic crashes – one person every 23 seconds.
Between 20 and 50 million are injured. Globally, car crashes are the number-one cause of death for people aged between five and 29.
More than half of global road traffic deaths are pedestrians, cyclists and motorcyclists, making this a problem that continues to merit discussion, debate and action.
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Dylan Campbell
Contributor
Dylan Campbell has been road-testing and writing about cars and the new-car industry since 2006. An independent motoring expert based in Melbourne, Dylan is a former Editor of Wheels Magazine, MOTOR Magazine and the TopGear Australia website.
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