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Couldn't part of this just be that men are riskier and more aggressive drivers? Women experience more minor fender benders but men get into major crashes way more. The fatal crash rate for men is almost twice as high as women apparently.
I recall a factoid that young men have a higher crash rate when they have male passengers, but a lower crash rate when they have female passengers in the car. A variety of explanations were offered.
When I'm driving with the boys, there's this little part of my monkey brain whispering "this is a competition. The faster you go, the braver you are and the more they'll respect you." The idea of being "the slow driver" in the group is mortifying. With women or family in the car, the little monkey remains quiet and a greater sense of responsibility for my passengers takes hold.
That's why James May is the best. He has transcended this irrational fear.
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I've always suspected that a material portion of the fatalities are suicides.
True, but sufficiently advanced risk-taking is indistinguishable from suicide.
This is most apparent in war zones; as the designated war gender, men are a bit more instinctively accepting of this.
Interesting, I'd never encountered it written out so well, but this is a concept I ran into (somewhat) recently. I had a friend who committed suicide, which caught every one of his friends and family by surprise. Cliche about how he was always the most lively person in any setting where he was, and how much better he was at socializing and bringing people together than anyone else applies in full here. One of the many things he was known for, though, was being an incredibly reckless (and yet somehow also wreck-less) driver. Almost everyone I met who had been driven by him once (including myself) sweared off ever being driven by him again, for fear of death, and he regularly drove his moped for hours through snowy/rainy/stormy weather day or night, ostensibly just to visit us or other friends. After the fact, some of us in his friend group started wondering if his driving behavior was a form of passive suicide that he was seeking out. He never left a note or confided in anyone who has spoken out (closest we've got is multiple of his ex-girlfriends noting how different and dead he appeared in private after the many social events he would both organize and improve through his presence, but no one ever considered this notable until after the suicide), so we'll never know (and even he might not have been privy to his motivations at the time).
Also interestingly enough, despite owning both firearms and vehicles, his way of going involved engineering a contraption to suffocate himself with helium, something which seemed to have taken some planning and execution over some hours, if not days, for procurement. I imagine there are likely many other people who had similar mindsets who made snap decisions during driving that appeared as accidents rather than suicide.
I can't vouch for it, but the argument I heard was this:
When there is a well-publicized suicide, suicide rates go up for a while.
Additionally, when there is a well-publicized suicide, single vehicle car crashes also go up for a while.
The inference is that a lot of these single vehicle car crashes are suicides / suicide attempts, perhaps because the individual involved wants to conceal the fact that it is a suicide (for life insurance purposes, for social purposes, etc.)
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