Car safety tech cuts crashes, insurance claims
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Illustration: Aïda Amer/Axios
Mounting research shows that vehicle safety technologies are making roads safer and reducing insurance claims.
Why it matters: Nearly 40,000 people — including more than 7,000 pedestrians — die each year in U.S. vehicle-related accidents.
Driving the news: The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration on Wednesday reported that traffic deaths fell 6.7% in 2025 from the year before, to an estimated 36,640.
- And the year saw the second-lowest traffic fatality rate on record, with 1.10 fatalities per 100 million vehicle miles traveled, according to NHTSA.
Between the lines: The Highway Loss Data Institute recently found significantly fewer insurance claims for cars equipped with safety features like automatic front and rear emergency braking, lane departure prevention and high-beam assist.
- HLDI's study, announced in March, found that cars with one basic feature — automatic emergency braking — saw a 13% reduction in property damage claim rates.
- Bundling safety features together — AEB with pedestrian detection, adaptive cruise control, high-beam assist, lane departure warning and prevention and rear emergency braking — saw up to a 39% drop in claims, the data showed.
Separately, preliminary data from the Governors Highway Safety Association found pedestrian deaths dropped nearly 11% in the first half of 2025 from the same period the prior year.
- A report accompanying GHSA's data did not directly attribute reasons for the decline, but noted that pedestrian automatic emergency braking, known as AEB, can improve safety.
- Previous data from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, from 2022, found that AEB reduces pedestrian crashes by 27%.
By the numbers: The drop in pedestrian deaths in the first half of 2025 is the largest annual decline since GHSA began tracking pedestrian fatalities 15 years ago.
What they're saying: "It's been really encouraging to see U.S. traffic fatalities starting to trend down recently, but there is a lot more work to do," David Harkey, president of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, HLDI's parent organization, told Axios.
Zoom in: IIHS's report from 2022 noted that AEB technologies don't work as well at night, which is why stricter standards are being put in place.
- More recent research from AAA shows that nighttime pedestrian AEB has improved as of 2025, though effectiveness still varies significantly between models.
Zoom out: And in addition to equipping cars with the latest crash avoidance technologies, the U.S. needs to be looking at better road infrastructure to protect walkers and bikers, and new policies to address things like speeding and impaired driving, Harkey said.
Friction point: The cost of safety
Critics, including some in Congress, have said advanced technologies are driving up the price of new vehicles.
- Harkey says safety features aren't to blame — instead, it's convenience features such as hands-free power liftgates, fancier sound systems and more advanced powertrains.
- Crash avoidance technologies are increasingly offered as standard equipment, and there are a dozen models priced under $30,000 that earn IIHS' top safety rating.
The risk, says Harkey, is that Americans hold on to older vehicles that lack crash protection and safety systems because new cars are too expensive.
- NHTSA last year delayed changes to its five-star safety rating program intended to speed adoption of many of these technologies.
- Automakers asked for the delay, saying they need more time to comply with stricter rules on automatic braking and pedestrian crash avoidance.
State of play: The new rules now go into effect for the 2027 model year.
What we're watching: The hands-free risk
While crash prevention technologies can save lives, there is continued scrutiny on more advanced systems that add automation to these building block technologies, enabling hands-free driving in certain situations.
- NHTSA is escalating its safety probe into Tesla's Full Self-Driving software after a series of crashes, for example.
- On Tuesday, the National Transportation Safety Board concluded that drivers' overreliance on Ford's Blue Cruise hands-free system contributed to two fatal crashes.
- NTSB is calling for stricter performance standards for these automated systems and improvements to driver monitoring systems.
Reality check: Even with the improved numbers, the U.S. still has one of the highest road fatality rates of any wealthy nation, per the International Transport Forum.
- Traffic deaths in the U.S. soared during the COVID pandemic, mostly attributed to riskier driving behavior during that period.
- Since then, the number of fatalities has again fallen below 40,000 per year — but that's still enough to fill a baseball stadium.
The bottom line: Cars are getting better at preventing crashes — but drivers' growing reliance on automation may be creating new ways for things to go wrong.
