More car ads promote vehicle performance despite dangers of speed

A new study from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety finds that from 2018 to 2022, advertisements emphasizing vehicle performance increased even as deaths linked to speeding and aggressive driving continued to mount.

Forty-three percent of vehicle ads aired during 2018, 2020 and 2022 highlighted speed, maneuverability, traction, stopping or power. The focus on performance grew over time, and speed was emphasized more than twice as often as safety, the researchers found.

“Showing a stunt driver zooming around a tight turn in the rain might seem harmless, but these ads reinforce our cultural obsession with speed,” IIHS President David Harkey said. “The fine print may caution that it’s a professional driver on a closed course, but the message they convey is that you can drive this way too.”

That’s not a helpful takeaway for U.S. drivers. In 2024, 11,288 lives were lost in speed-related crashes, representing 29% of all road deaths in the country.

U.S. lacks regulation

From 1950s hot-rod songs to action-film franchises like The Fast and the Furious, speed has long been a celebrated part of U.S. car culture. Vehicle advertisements — unlike movies or music — are designed specifically to persuade. Many of them present high-performance driving as something consumers can purchase and experience.

The phenomenon is not new. An ad for the Nissan 300ZX Turbo shown during the 1990 Super Bowl was criticized by IIHS and other safety groups as showing “a blatant disregard for public safety.” The automaker agreed not to run it again. Still, an IIHS analysis of television advertising in 1998 found that performance was a theme in about half of all automobile ads.

In other countries, regulators control vehicle ads. The United Kingdom, for example, has standards that prohibit ads that encourage a culture of dangerous driving, explicitly restricting messages about power, acceleration or handling unless the context clearly relates to safety (such as swerving to avoid a crash).

In the United States, broadcasters, rather than regulators, set standards, but they are ambiguous and easily circumvented.

For example, during the years covered by the study, the advertising standards of ViacomCBS, which later became Paramount, prohibited “risky behavior portrayed positively,” but they did not include a definition of risky behavior.

ABC’s standards were more specific, stating that “safe and lawful driving practices should be depicted at all times,” but there was no mention of sticking to reasonable speeds in their examples of safe driving.

Similarly, NBCUniversal required that advertisers “portray compliance with standard safety precautions,” calling out the use of seat belts but ignoring speed.

As a result of such ambiguity, a large number of ads show drivers speeding, driving aggressively or testing the limits of the vehicle being advertised, the IIHS study found. 

“Advertising like this has helped normalize speeding, masking how dangerous it is,” said IIHS Research Scientist Amber Woods, lead author of the study. “Just think about how different attitudes are toward speeding versus impaired driving.”

Performance versus safety

To identify the most common messages in vehicle marketing, IIHS gathered more than 1,500 television ads that aired in 2018, 2020 and 2022, along with more than 1,000 internet and social media ads from 2020 and 2022. The team developed a list of 23 themes — such as speed or speeding, luxury or prestige, and heritage or nostalgia — and a set of visual cues associated with each theme. For example, cues for comfort and convenience included interior shots emphasizing spaciousness as well as on-screen statistics about legroom and cargo capacity.

Ten coders from the University of Virginia’s media studies department completed a three-hour training session and then reviewed 600 ads each, noting the primary theme and any secondary themes. Ads that included speed or speeding, maneuverability, power, stopping or traction were classified as performance ads. Because an ad that airs hundreds of times is likely to have more impact than one shown only a few times, the researchers weighted their results using ad-spending data from Nielsen Ad Intel.

Statistical analysis showed that, across the full study period, performance was the most common theme, appearing in 43% of ads. About 16% included speed or speeding, and 28% emphasized traction. By comparison, only 8% of ads highlighted safety.

Some of the performance-related concepts — maneuverability, stopping and traction, especially — seem innocuous or even like safety necessities. But that’s not how many ads portrayed them.

Any ad that depicted the vehicle driving in adverse weather conditions or on slippery or uneven terrain was coded for traction, for example, but less than 1 out of 10 of those ads was also coded for safety, meaning there was no mention of using those capabilities to avoid crashes. Instead, traction was most often evoked with footage of vehicles kicking up clouds of dust on remote dirt tracks, zooming down the beach or rumbling over boulders in the mountains.

“The vast majority of viewers are never going to take their vehicle through a mountain stream or up a sand dune, but this kind of ad could influence the way they drive in risky on-road conditions — in rainy or snowy weather, for instance,” Woods said.

Sedans, pickups and SUVs

The emphasis on performance increased over time. From 2018 to 2022, the share of ads focused on speed rose from 14% to 19%, and the share centering on traction rose from 20% to 38%. Over the same period, the share of ads highlighting safety fell from 11% to 3%.

Performance themes were common in ads for all kinds of vehicles but featured more heavily in ads for pickups than ads for sedans and SUVs. That may reflect the SUV’s new status as America’s family vehicle and pickup buyers’ interest in payload and towing capacity. Nevertheless, the probability that an ad for an SUV would be themed around performance rose from 28% in 2018 to 45% in 2022.

Depictions of speed or speeding were much more common in sedan advertising than in ads for pickups and SUVs. In 2020, speed or speeding themes appeared in 47% of sedan ads, compared with 11% of SUV ads and 5% of pickup ads. 

The influence of an advertisement isn’t limited to the people who buy that kind of vehicle, so the depictions of speed in ads for luxury sedans could affect the behavior of other drivers too.

Other aspects of performance, though they were considered separately in the study, can also be code words for speed. Maneuverability or “performance handling,” in marketing terms, means taking corners fast. Horsepower, while it is a necessary component of towing capacity, is also a key component of acceleration.

“This study highlights the cultural dimension of our road safety crisis,” Harkey said. “Automakers and broadcasters need to start treating unsafe speed the same way they would drunk driving or failure to use a seat belt.”