The Paris Auto Show is full of interesting cars Americans can’t have

Small EVs and efficient people carriers update familiar names for the modern age.

arstechnica.com/cars/2026/10/europe-shows-a-better-alternative-to-big-suvs-at-the-paris-auto-show/

Made for the civilized streets of Europe, not the kill-or-be-killed Mad Max hellscape of the the automotive United States.

Edit: Are we making an exception for Rome?

Tell me you have never been oversea’s (let alone drove there) without telling me you have never been overseas.

Everywhere in the world people drive like ass hats. It part of the human condition.

Yes, but the problem in the US is we have several generations of cars built to be “safe” for the driver, which means more dangerous for everyone else, meaning drivers of large vehicles drive wrecklessly with absolutely no fear for their own lives and aren’t removed from the gene pool.

I just sorta assumed this was true (in no small part because I accept xkcd as infallible gospel). But I was curious and just dug into it, and it appears that the fatality rate for accidents with injury in the US is among the lowest. And while the accident-with-injury rate is higher in the US than the combined EU + EFTA it’s not so different as to change this relationship. I really didn’t expect that, and I wish I could find more recent data to see how the trend has changed up to today (the best data I could find on this was from 2015 - which is well into the era of the US fixation on suburban combat vehicles, but as they may make up a higher % of all vehicles on the road now, I’m very curious to see what the current data shows)

(Chart in spoiler because I don't want to clutter up the thread:)

Source The report this is pulled from excludes non-injury MV accidents

This is heavily dependent on incident report rates. Incidents are underreported in countries where insurance doesn’t require police reports and/or litigation risk is much lower.

Deaths are pretty well recorded, and there you see that the US is much higher in vehicle deaths per capita. Deaths per billion vehicle-km is also useful, as you can argue that per capita the US drives a lot more, so you will see more incidents due to the traffic exposure being higher.

Summarizing: The US has well over twice as many traffic deaths per capita at 110+ vs 45 in the EU. The worst EU country is Romania with 78. The US is closer when you compare kms driven: about 7 deaths per billion km, still way higher than northern Europe (2-4) and about on par with Belgium (that’s unfortunately not something to be proud of). Quite a bit safer than the lower scoring countries though on that metric, like 14.4 for the Czech Republic.