Skip to main content

Traffic Fatalities in US Reach Highest Level Since 2007

Cars may be getting more advanced safety features, but U.S. traffic-related deaths are on the rise.

According to the National Safety Council, an estimated 40,200 deaths occurred last year on the road, a rise of 6 percent. It’s the first time since 2007 there were more than 40,000 fatalities. The increase likely comes from the fact that Americans drove more miles last year, a 3-percent increase in total miles. The National Safety Council attributes the increase to lower gas prices and an improving economy.

The increase in traffic-related fatalities in the past two years is the sharpest increase in 53 years.

The estimated annual mileage death rate in 2016 was 1.25 deaths per 100 million vehicle miles, an increase of 3 percent compared to 2015.

It’s worth noting that the National Safety Council’s fatality estimates differ slightly from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). The government only counts deaths that occur on public roads, while the council includes fatalities in parking lots, driveways and private roads.

NHTSA recently reported traffic fatalities jumped 10.4 percent in the first half of 2016.

This article first appeared on Auto Guide

The post Traffic Fatalities in US Reach Highest Level Since 2007 appeared first on VWVortex.



from VWVortex http://ift.tt/2lqVWeW
via IFTTT

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Project SportWagen: Going Stage 2 with APR

    When we last left you, the humble little SportWagen was fresh from the development process with our friends at AWE Tuning, sporting a new downpipe, exhaust and intake, allowing things to breathe a bit easier.  The car sounded great, but there was no getting around the fact that our wagon was still quite, well, slow.   While we realize that nothing we do to the Golf SportWagen at this point will make it a race car, we still felt compelled to do something .  To put it bluntly, we had a fever, and the only cure was more power. Flash forward a few hours, and we found ourselves at Waterfest, staring down APR’s palatial spread and the numerous tuned vehicles surrounding it.  Earlier in the year, APR had hinted to us that their 1.8 TSI files would be quite impressive, and based on what they were able to do with the 2.0 TSI found in the new GTI and our time in their Golf R, we knew it’d be worth the wait.  So with this in mind, we lined our G...

Project Golf SportWagen- Intro

I’ve never really been one for SUVs and crossovers.  The current offerings aren’t the body-on-frame, go-anywhere specialty tools I remember from my youth, and what they lack in capability, they also lack in on-road performance. The current crop isn’t terribly good at handling or being efficient, which in my opinion are major components of our ideal driving experience.  So when it comes to space or utility, I usually look for something of the wagon variety- and it seems that I’m not alone. We hit quite a few shows around the east coast each summer, and we see modified Jetta SportWagens at nearly every event. Even amongst common consumers, these cars are highly sought-after. They don’t depreciate much, making even early Mk 5 2.5 versions expensive in comparison to other Jettas or Golfs of the same vintage. This year, Volkswagen launched their latest SportWagen, which is now billed as a Golf.  In many ways, this latest SportWagen is the best yet and it has certai...

Volkswagen Group Records Best Ever First-Half-of-Year Sales

With 5.5 million vehicles in customer hands after the first six months of 2018, the Volkswagen Group is seeing the best performance of its history. Group deliveries increased significantly in all core regions,” said Fred Kappler, head of sales for the Group. “Our core brands recorded strong growth in the first half year.” For the year-to-date, all of Volkswagen’s brands had sales bumps. MAN, SEAT, and Skoda led the sales charge with performances 24%, 17% and 11% better than the previous year. The big sellers, too, had strong sales periods, with Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles, Audi, and Volkswagen sales rising 3.5%, 4.5% and 6.3% respectively. That last figure is particularly good new for the board, since Volkswagen alone sold more than 3 million vehicles in the first half of 2018. As Kappler stated, the numbers are equally good when you break sales down by region. Brazil and Russia were the most improved markets (22% and 20%, respectively), while strong sales in Europe and China (u...