Research published by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety found that 43 percent of vehicle advertisements airing in 2018, 2020 and 2022 emphasized speed, maneuverability, traction, stopping power or raw horsepower — and that the emphasis grew more pronounced over time. Speed was highlighted more than twice as often as safety. By 2022, only 3 percent of ads foregrounded safety at all, down from 11 percent four years earlier.
Meanwhile, speeding killed 11,288 people on American roads in 2024, accounting for nearly 29 percent of all traffic deaths in the country.
“Showing a stunt driver zooming around a tight turn in the rain might seem harmless,” said David Harkey, president of the IIHS. “But these ads reinforce our cultural obsession with speed. 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.”
The study, led by IIHS research scientist Amber Woods, analyzed more than 1,500 television commercials and more than 1,000 internet and social media ads. A team of 10 coders from the University of Virginia’s media studies department reviewed the material against a framework of 23 themes, from luxury and nostalgia to speed and traction. Results were weighted by advertising spending data from Nielsen Ad Intel, giving greater weight to ads that aired repeatedly.
The findings complicate a comfortable industry assumption — that depicting a vehicle’s capabilities is simply good marketing rather than a public safety concern.
Some of the performance themes the study identified, like traction and maneuverability, might seem neutral or even safety-adjacent. But the researchers found that fewer than one in ten ads coded for traction also mentioned crash avoidance or other safety applications. Far more often, traction was illustrated with footage of trucks tearing across beaches or pickup trucks fording mountain streams — scenarios that almost no viewer will ever encounter but that researchers say could shape how drivers behave in far more common hazardous conditions, like snow or heavy rain.
“The vast majority of viewers are never going to take their vehicle through a mountain stream or up a sand dune,” Woods said. “But this kind of ad could influence the way they drive in risky on-road conditions.”
Speed-themed advertising was especially concentrated in sedan commercials. In 2020, nearly half of all sedan ads — 47 percent — featured speed or speeding imagery, compared with 11 percent of SUV ads and just 5 percent of pickup truck ads. But SUVs, now the dominant vehicle category in the American market, are catching up: the share of SUV ads built around performance themes rose from 28 percent in 2018 to 45 percent in 2022.
The problem, researchers say, is structural. In the United Kingdom, advertising standards explicitly prohibit content that promotes a culture of dangerous driving, restricting messaging about power, acceleration or handling unless it is clearly tied to safety. In the United States, those standards belong to broadcasters, not regulators — and they are written loosely enough to permit most of what the study describes.
During the years covered by the research, ViacomCBS barred “risky behavior portrayed positively” without defining what risky behavior meant. ABC required that “safe and lawful driving practices should be depicted at all times” but made no mention of speed. NBCUniversal called out seat belts as a safety precaution while saying nothing about velocity.
That ambiguity has a long lineage. The IIHS criticized a Nissan 300ZX Turbo ad during the 1990 Super Bowl as showing “a blatant disregard for public safety.” Nissan agreed not to air it again. A separate IIHS analysis of television advertising in 1998 found that performance was a theme in roughly half of all automobile ads — a figure that, nearly three decades later, has barely moved.
“Advertising like this has helped normalize speeding, masking how dangerous it is,” Woods said. “Just think about how different attitudes are toward speeding versus impaired driving.”
Harkey was direct about what he believes needs to change. “Automakers and broadcasters need to start treating unsafe speed the same way they would drunk driving or failure to use a seat belt,” he said. The industry, so far, has not.