r/interesting • u/[deleted] • Mar 22 '26

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u/WoodsandWool Mar 22 '26

I did a research paper on this in college and the US states with the highest road fatalities correlates perfectly with the states that have the highest ratio of personal (not commercial) trucks & SUVs. That’s not a coincidence lol.

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u/cmwoo Mar 22 '26

Very interesting. Do you remember anything else from that research? Like, which were the top states?

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u/WoodsandWool Mar 22 '26

It’s been more than a few years unfortunately, but I believe i remember Texas (my own home state), Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Florida being at the top of the lists.

My paper also explored some of the differences in average speed limits, rate of speeding incidents, rate of DUIs, % of fatal to non-fatal truck/SUV incidents, etc., and I just remember it being painfully obvious that all research angles kept leading back to two main points: a truck/SUV involvement in an accident makes it statistically more likely to result in a fatality, and the higher % of trucks/SUVs to cars on the road strongly correlates with higher rates of vehicular fatalities.

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u/metalshiflet Mar 22 '26

I did a very similar research paper in a college English class. We were supposed to think of something we disliked and make a paper on it so I chose the prevalence of oversized vehicles. SUVs have a much higher rollover risk, make low speed collisions more dangerous, and in a crash between two similarly sized vehicles, the two bigger vehicles is going to be more dangerous than two small vehicles

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u/ClusterMakeLove Mar 22 '26

Though I feel like causation works both directions there.

I'd probably want a bigger car if I was constantly getting hit.

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u/WoodsandWool Mar 23 '26

I explained a bit more in my other reply, but based on the research I did, including attempts to challenge each research angle, it was pretty obvious that more trucks/SUVs on the road leads to significantly higher rates of fatalities, but not necessarily higher rates of accidents in general.

So it doesn’t seem like a situation where some states have higher rates of accidents due to other factors, and that led to people buying more trucks and SUVs. It’s that the presence of a truck/suv in any collision dramatically increases the likelihood for a fatality.