A new study finds that performance-focused vehicle advertising grew more prevalent between 2018 and 2022, even as speeding continued to claim tens of thousands of American lives. 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