Which country has the most car accidents in the world?
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This list of countries by traffic-related death rate shows the annual number of road fatalities per capita per year, per number of motor vehicles, and per vehicle-km in some countries in the year the data was collected.
Over a third of road traffic deaths in low- and middle-income countries are among pedestrians and cyclists.
However, less than 35 percent of low- and middle-income countries have policies in place to protect these road users.
The overall ranking of countries' fatality rates has not changed significantly, with the safest roads still found in Sweden (22 deaths per one million inhabitants) and Denmark (27/million).
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.
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.
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.
Between 2010 and 2019, there were 2,125,994 traffic accidents according to official Chinese government sources.
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.
Top 10 Countries with the Most Car Accidents
1.United States
2.Japan
3.Germany
4.Turkiye
5.Italy
6.United Kingdom
7.Canada
8.Spain
9.France
10.Belgium
Ref: Which country has the most car accidents in the world? (drive)
