Dangerous Driving Songs

Dangerous Christmas Songs

Christmas is never really in full swing until the Christmas songs start to play out. But these festive tunes could also be influencing how we drive in ways we’re not fully aware of! To build upon our road trip song analysis we analysed over 100 Xmas belters to find the most dangerous.

The results were calculated using the tempo and energy of a song to determine how fast, loud and noisy a track feels. It’s been suggested that for safer driving, the music you listen to should mimic the human heartbeat, with a BPM that falls in-between 60-100. High BPM and energy songs were ranked as less safe, as studies have shown music with a BPM greater than 120 can result in faster driving speeds and more traffic violations. Check out the most dangerous below:

So which Christmas songs should you drive to? Here are the safest that we analysed:

The full list of Christmas songs analysed can be found here.

Dangerous Road Trip Songs

When on a drive, there can be no better feeling than singing along to a classic hit. But how might these songs influence how we drive? We’ve investigated how the music we listen to might change how we drive and the biggest culprits for more erratic driving! Check out the results in our dangerous driving songs interactive.

We’ve run through some of the key areas of investigation below.

Most Dangerous Radio Stations

Every radio station has their own style, often tailored to a specific genre. But which of these could be impacting how you drive?

We took a random sample of 15 songs from the most popular UK radio stations to see which had the highest number of dangerous songs – the results may well surprise you!

Most Dangerous Road Trip Songs

We analysed Spotify to find the most common songs included in road trip playlists. Based off of this we identified which of these may cause dangerous driving – over 71% of which fit the criteria!

The top 5 most dangerous songs included:

Check out the full list on our interactive.

Most Popular Road Trip Artists

Of all road trip playlists, which artist was the most popular? There were 4 artists that were tied with 4 songs each in the top 100 – but there was one clear winner based on how many times their songs were included, find out who took the road trip crown.

Sources

Our analysis was based on the following research, a full methodology can be found on our interactive.

[1] Brodsky (2001) “The effects of music tempo on simulated driving performance and vehicular control” ‘Transportations Research’ Part F 4 pp.219-241 (https://in.bgu.ac.il/humsos/art/DocLib/Pages/Scientific-Publications-warren/17_TRF.pdf)

[2] https://www.confused.com/car-insurance/guides/motoring-conviction-codes

[3] Dalton et al. (2007) “Effects of sound types and volumes on simulated driving, vigilance tasks and heart rate” ‘Occupational Ergonomics’ 7(3) pp.153-168