By Paul Davenport February 13, 2025
There’s no one-size-fits-all solution to prevent vehicle crashes. With more than 240 million Americans getting behind the wheel each year—and an estimated 77 percent of employed Americans commuting each day—unexpected incidents are an unfortunate inevitability.
Even with advances to driving technology coming online in recent years designed specifically to make roads safer—think of the rear-view camera display on your dashboard, as well as parking or lane change assist systems that account for ‘blind spots’—the number of fatal incidents on American roads remains relatively steady year-over-year.
In fact, the 2025 Roadmap to Safety Report from the Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety (Advocates) estimates that 40,099 Americans were killed in motor vehicle crashes in 2023—the latest year with complete government and private sector reporting. While this figure is roughly 3 percent down from the more than 42,000 fatalities tracked in 2022, the early numbers for 2024 are trending at-pace with annual averages over the past decade.
While loss of life is the greatest price paid in this context—and the most important number to try to drive down—the fallout from these incidents includes a financial burden that touches a wide array of stakeholders.
In this blog, we’ll break down how much vehicle crash incidents and fatalities impact the larger economy, and steps that businesses can take to make their driving workforce safer.
According to the Advocates, it’s estimated that vehicle crashes in 2019 cost the US economy roughly $340 billion—or $417 billion when adjusted for inflation in 2024.
Digging into the numbers, the Network of Employers for Traffic Safety (NETS) tallied up the total cost of direct crash-related expenses to exceed $72 billion for employers specifically. This includes everything from legal settlements for incidents that happen while employees are driving company-provided cars, to broad-based insurance premium rate hikes that trail drivers—and their employers—after even minor collisions.
Breaking the numbers up even further, it’s estimated that—adjusted for inflation—vehicle collisions cost the US economy in 2022:
Spread across the entire population, it’s estimated that vehicle crashes cost each individual American $1,268 in 2022—a price that the Advocates characterize as a “crash tax” for every citizen.
According to Cathy Chase, President of the Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, along with individuals and businesses ‘stepping up’ to combat the high incidence of traffic fatalities, state and local governments are behind in deploying key protections too.
“Every day in the U.S., millions of people get behind the wheel, commuting to work or school, carpooling kids to music lessons or athletic events, or going to the market or a local hardware store. Not one of them thinks they are going to get into a crash, and yet an average of 116 people are killed, and more than 6,500 people are injured in motor vehicle crashes every day,” Chase said in a statement releasing the 2025 Report findings.
The Advocates—which includes legislators from across the US—use their annual Roadmap to Safety report to grade every state and Washington, DC, on their progress in deploying protections for drivers. The grades are based on ratings in six categories: Occupant Protection, Child Passenger Safety, Young Drivers, Impaired Driving, Distracted Driving and Automated Enforcement to Curb Speed and Red Light Running.
From there, the group applies a “green,” “yellow,” or “red” label to each state in their rank that reflects each state’s progress toward passing legislation that prioritizes driver safety.
Only six states—Louisiana, Maryland, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Washington—and DC received a “green” rating.
On the flip side, nine states were rated “red” for failing to make progress toward the Advocates’ proposals: Idaho, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, Oklahoma, South Dakota, and Wyoming.
The remaining 35 states receive a “yellow” or caution rating, showing that by-and-large, the country has lots of work to do in ensuring better protections for drivers.
Some of the specific measures outlined by the Advocates include:
Keeping America’s roads safe is more than just the responsibility of legislators. While drivers themselves need to take accountability for their individual actions, there are steps employers can take to guide better behaviors—and ideally stem the incidence of accidents—across their mobile workforce.
Although there are an array of vehicle programs available to meet the specific needs of businesses across industries, every company can benefit from standardizing safety protocols.
For instance, it’s estimated that roughly 75 percent of drivers who have had their licenses suspended remain behind the wheel. Businesses need to be able to actively and passively monitor Motor Vehicle Records (MVR) so that they are alerted proactively when risky behavior—ie. Driving without a license—could unlock a higher risk of collisions and costs to the business.
Similarly, businesses need to be sure that their drivers have adequate and effective insurance coverage. Even if your business uses a reimbursement model to repay drivers for their work travel in a personal vehicle, you still need to ensure there are no lapses in personal coverage that could make your business liable in the event of an on-the-job collision.
There’s also the opportunity for vehicle program administrators to enroll their driving employees in safety training, improving employees’ core driving skills to proactively instill best practices across their driving workforce.
Learn more about how you can monitor Motor Vehicle Records without overextending your administrative workload in this guide, and reach out to our team today to learn about the full suite of Motus Protect solutions.
Note: Statistics based on 2025 Roadmap to Safety Report from Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety.
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