Some cars just scream “speeding ticket machine.” Whether it’s a hood scoop, a spoiler or a paint job with a shark in the shape of a bullet, there are some cars — and car brands — that seem designed to attract the attention of police radar guns.
However, according to a new report from Insurify, those nameplates may not be the ones that immediately come to mind — your Ferraris, Lamborghinis and such. The insurance comparison website recently crunched the numbers to find the top five car brands with the largest percentage of drivers with at least one speeding violation on their record, as reported by The Drive, and they’re all surprising in their own way.
Here are the top five:
- Alfa Romeo: 41.45% more speeding tickets than average
- Subaru: 20.38% more
- Volkswagen: 17.77% more
- Maserati: 16.20% more
- Ram: 15.74% more
The average rate of speeding tickets, by the way, is 10.53%. That means about one-tenth of the U.S. population has at least one speeding ticket on record.
If you’re wondering how this curious and relatively disparate collection of automakers all made the list, a few key insights that might help explain things:
- The Ram numbers here are actually much more significant than Alfa Romeo because of the sheer number of Ram trucks sold, almost 564K in 2020, versus the relatively small number from the Italian marque, under 19K, according to sales data from GoodCarBadCar.
- From Alfa Romeo’s lineup, the worst offending model is the Giulia. Yes, a four-door sports sedan is the worst of the worst.
- For the potentially surprising third-place Volkswagen, the sporty GTI was the worst offender, helping push the automaker onto the list, while drivers of the discontinued Beetle were the least likely to have a ticket on their record among VW owners.
- While this is an interesting look at the speeding landscape, it’s not the final word on the matter. As the company points out, it used its database of four million insurance applications to arrive at these results, and while that’s a sizable data set, people who drive Porsches and Bugattis aren’t likely to be comparing auto insurance on Insurify. If this were a comprehensive look, you can bet names in that realm would crop up.
Also, just as a clarification, while Insurify states in its report that “motor vehicle fatalities from speeding have trended downwards each year,” that’s not actually the case. After a year of pandemic-fueled dangerous driving, not only did the total number of motor vehicle traffic fatalities increase from 2019 to 2020, as reported by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, but so did the number of speeding-related fatalities.
While it’s fun to see what the car you drive says about you, hopefully we don’t need to remind you that speeding is no joke.
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