Safest European country to drive in

New research has revealed the safest and most dangerous European countries to drive in, with Norway  coming out on top of the safety list.

The study by Vignetteswitzerland.com analysed the latest data from the European Transport Safety Council (2022 figures) to see which countries had the lowest and highest number of road deaths per million inhabitants.

Safe roads in Scandinavia

The study  found that Norway is statistically the safest country to drive in in Europe as in 2022 it  only had 21.38 deaths per million inhabitants, the lowest of any European country.

Compared to 2012 data, this is a 26.48 per cent drop within the decade, with 2012 having 29.08 deaths per million inhabitants.

Sweden comes second on the list of safest countries, with just 21.72 road deaths per million inhabitants. Compared to 2012 data, this is a drop of 27.74 per cent from when the country had 30.05 road deaths per million inhabitants.

Coming in third place is the United Kingdom, which comes in with 25.89 road deaths per million inhabitants. The change in road deaths is less significant than other entries on the list, with a drop of just 9.51 per cent from 2012, where road deaths sat at 28.61 per million inhabitants.

Denmark takes fourth place, with 26.22 road deaths per million inhabitants and in fifth place is Switzerland, with 27.58 road deaths per million inhabitants.

Spain didn’t do too badly sitting at 10^th place with 37.08 road deaths per million inhabitants which is a 9.8 per cent improvement on the 2012 figure.

Be careful in the Balkans

The statistically most dangerous place to drive in Europe according to this research is Romania which had 85.81 deaths per million inhabitants but the good news is it’s a 10.26 per cent drop from 2012, which saw 95.62 deaths per million inhabitants.

In fact it’s the Balkans which are the most dangerous with Romania followed by Serbia, Bulgaria and Croatia but somewhat surprisingly, statistically the fifth most dangerous place to drive is Portugal with 62.30 road deaths per million inhabitants.

Drive safely

Commenting on the findings, M. E.Wijnmalen, CEO of Vignetteswitzerland.com, said: “With how connected Europe is, and how easy it is to travel from one country into another, it’s important to keep knowledge of the driving conditions in each country you travel to.

“Many factors can affect these conditions, such as road quality, driving laws or even changes in speed limits that can influence the risk you run of simply just being on the road.”