Car ads increasingly show off performance instead of safety. Expert says that's a problem

Car and truck ads can be ubiquitous if you’re watching TV or a streaming service, and new research finds more and more of those commercials are showing off vehicle performance, rather than safety features.

The study from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety finds between 2018 and 2022, nearly half of the ads focused on things like the vehicle’s speed, power or maneuverability.

And the group says this is happening as the number of deaths due to speeding and reckless behavior are also on the rise.

Amber Woods is a research scientist at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety and lead author of this report. She joined The Show to talk more about it.

Insurance Institute of Highway Safety

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Full conversation

MARK BRODIE: Amber, what are the implications of what you found here?

AMBER WOODS: Well, I think advertisements are meant to influence behavior. They’re meant to encourage you to purchase a product and if we’re influencing behavior in a way that promotes dangerous driving behaviors, that could have very negative effects on our roads.

We know that speeding is a major highway safety concern, and we’re trying to do anything we can to reduce the amount of speeding and limit the number of people that are dying on our roadways.

MARK BRODIE: In terms of what we see in ads, is it mostly speeding that are the behaviors that you wouldn’t want people to do on the roadway?

AMBER WOODS: So I think performance in general, in the study, we define performance as any ad that highlighted speed, maneuverability, traction, stopping or power. And some of those might sound relatively normal and not of concern, like traction or things like that. You need horsepower to tow things.

But what we’re seeing is that these traction ads aren’t promoting traction as a safety feature. They’re showing the vehicle, you know, spinning up sand in the desert or driving around a beach and kicking up a lot of sand, like things that you’re never really going to do in your vehicle necessarily but that could promote risky driving behavior when on-road conditions are difficult.

So if it’s raining or snowy and you’re like, oh, well I saw my vehicle could go up a snowy mountainside in the ad, so I can definitely handle this with no problem.

MARK BRODIE: So it sounds like it’s less a matter of people trying to replicate what they see in commercials on the roads, but maybe extrapolating out, "oh, I saw my vehicle do this in an ad, it must be able to do this," that I would or might want to do on the roadway.

AMBER WOODS: I think it could definitely give people a false sense of the capabilities of the vehicle and their capabilities as a driver. Most of these ads or some of the ads will say, you know, professional driver on a closed course — and people don’t always think about that.

MARK BRODIE: Did you notice that this was the case with different types of vehicles like were some more likely to focus on performance in the ads than others?

AMBER WOODS: Absolutely. We found that, you know, trucks and SUVs focused on performance more than sedans. When we broke that down specifically into speed though, the sedans were more likely to have speed as their performance measure of the ad than the trucks or SUVs.

MARK BRODIE: Were there any types of vehicles that really seemed to emphasize safety over performance?

AMBER WOODS: There are definitely some manufacturers that are doing a great job and are highlighting, you know, new, advanced safety features in their vehicles and yes, absolutely.

MARK BRODIE: I guess that’s kind of the interesting thing here because so many vehicles now come standard with safety features that even just a few years ago almost nobody had. And yet to the point this report is making and you’re making, in a lot of commercials like you don’t really see those. You wouldn’t necessarily know that the car had them.

AMBER WOODS: Right. I, it seems to imply that safety doesn’t sell. But we have vehicles now that are, yes, very capable, but also very safe and they have all sorts of features that can be helpful to drivers.

And we’re not promoting those. We’re still you know, we’re still in America, and we’re excited about performance and speed.

MARK BRODIE: I mean that does kind of speak to kind of the car culture that we’ve had here for for generations now, right?

AMBER WOODS: Absolutely. America, America's built on car culture.

MARK BRODIE: So the report found that this is not necessarily the case in other parts of the world, right, where that car ads focus more on performance than safety. Is it really just a matter of who is setting the guidelines for what is acceptable and what is not on on television?

AMBER WOODS: So in our study, we did not look at ads from other countries, but we did look at the regulations on ads in the U.S. compared to countries like the UK. And our advertising standards are much more vague. They tend to mention things like risky driving behavior portrayed positively.

But there’s no direct mention of something like speed being a risky driving behavior, whereas in other countries, their advertising guidelines are much more explicit about what is OK and what is not.

MARK BRODIE: Do you have any reason to think that this trend that you have found is going to change anytime soon?

AMBER WOODS: It was not heading in the right direction based on the results of the study. We saw an increase in performance advertising from 2018 to 2022. We saw an increase in the focus on speed from 2018 to 2022. We were not headed in the right direction during that time.

MARK BRODIE: I mean, can you imagine a time when safety just isn’t mentioned in ads at all?

AMBER WOODS: I certainly hope not.

MARK BRODIE: Yeah. I mean I think for someone who does what you do, that would probably be a pretty disappointing outcome.

AMBER WOODS: Absolutely. If changing the advertising landscape can help move the needle just a little bit to make our roads more safe, then we support, you know, whatever it takes to make that happen.

MARK BRODIE: Is there a way do you think to let potential buyers know about a car’s performance without necessarily showing them doing something unsafe? Like, you know, if you’re buying a sports car, like I would imagine a lot of people buy sports cars because they can go fast. Like is there a way to show that or to show, you know, the towing capacity or some of the other things that people might want and look for in a car without doing it in an unsafe manner?

AMBER WOODS: I think that, you know, if your car has a lot of horsepower, if the vehicle you’re advertising has high towing capacity then it’s probably OK to mention those things but maybe that it needs to also be done in the context of saying that there are features that make this car safe or promoting it in such a way that does not involve cars racing through parking lots or driving fast down city streets. Doing it in such a way that’s more consistent with how you could safely use those features of the vehicle.

MARK BRODIE: Do you think that some of this is on us as consumers? Like, obviously, the car manufacturers must think that this is what people want to see when they’re making a choice to buy a car. Like, is some of this on us, the car buying public?

AMBER WOODS: For sure it probably is. You know, we’re Americans, we like the open road, we like fast cars and all of that car culture stuff. America is very behind other countries in terms of highway safety. And we need to make big cultural changes if we want to help save lives on the roadway.

MARK BRODIE: That is Amber Woods, a research scientist with the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. Amber, thank you so much. I appreciate it.

AMBER WOODS: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you.