A new study has attempted to quantify driving behavior by brand using actual insurance claims, traffic violation records, and other objective data to rank drivers of different vehicle makes by the quality and safety of their driving behavior. The methodology represents a more rigorous approach than the anecdotal stereotyping that typically drives these discussions, and some of the results both confirm popular perceptions and produce some surprising findings about brands whose drivers perform better or worse than their reputations would suggest. The study has generated the kind of passionate debate that any ranking of this type reliably produces across automotive social media communities.
Brand-based driver behavior research is inherently complicated by selection effects — the types of people who purchase specific vehicles influence the driving behavior data as much as any characteristic of the vehicle itself. Performance car buyers who are more likely to push their vehicles hard will produce different data than economy car buyers even if both groups are equally responsible drivers in objective terms. The study’s authors acknowledged these complications while defending their methodology as more useful than purely anecdotal assessments, and the conversation it has sparked about the relationship between vehicle choice and driving personality is both interesting and inevitably unresolvable with complete statistical certainty.
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