Numerous visitors to the Sciencebase site seem to arrive from the search engines using the phrase “red car crash”. I am not sure I had any specific content among the 4000 articles posted here since 1995 that would be useful to them and I am not entirely sure what they are hoping to find with that search. I suspect they’re perhaps musing on the risks associated with driving a red car as opposed to a car of any other colour.
The #DeceivedWisdom suggests that red cars are somehow safer to drive because we associate red with danger and other road users are warier of cars of that hue. Conversely, red is often a popular colour for high-performance vehicles and muscle cars with greater acceleration capabilities than lesser cars and so perhaps they are actually less safe to drive because they spend more of their time accelerating rapidly and being driven at higher speeds.
Search engines suggest that their users might be looking to answer any one of the following questions when searching for red car crash:
- Which Colour car has most accidents?
- Are red cars more likely to crash?
- What was the worst UK road accident?
- What is the safest color?
However, some studies have shown that you are more likely to be involved in a crash if you’re in a black car, rather than a red one, other studies found the opposite and that 60 percent of road traffic accidents (RTAs) involve a red car. Yet another study suggests that white cars are 12 percent less likely to be involved in an RTA than black cars, others suggest yellow is slightly safer than white. Given the almost random nature of the studies cited by the search engines in offering these so-called facts, I think we need a solid study to tell us once and for all whether a red car crash is more common than any other. This study goes some way to offering an insight, but considers the colour of the car of the driver who was not to blame for the car crash.
Importantly, driving under the influence of alcohol and/or drugs, distractions such as using a mobile phone, aggressive driving, and driving at a higher speed than is appropriate for the road conditions will most likely outweigh any consideration regarding the colour of one’s car.