Car crashes in Scotland that involve rental / hire cars: FOI release

Information requested

Car crashes in Scotland, specifically car crashes that involve rental / hire cars:

1) In the 6 months to 12 July 2024, how many car crashes were there in Scotland?

2) How many of those car crashes involved a hire car? Or if that data isn’t available

2) How many crashes involved foreign drivers?

3) How many of those car crashes involved a fatality?

4) What is the breakdown of those crashes by council region?

5) What is the year-on-year trend between 2018 and 2024 for this statistic?

Response

The records we hold relate to collisions where someone is injured or killed, and which become known to Police Scotland. Therefore, we do not hold information on non-injury collisions.

Unfortunately, we do not hold information on whether the vehicles involved in injury collisions were hired, or whether the driver was foreign. Public Health Scotland may be able to provide analysis of hospital admissions due to road traffic collisions broken down by the individual’s place of residence. The appropriate team in Public Health Scotland can be contacted via phs.benchmarkingproject@phs.scot.

We can identify whether the vehicles involved were left hand drive. Provisionally there were 1,844 injury car collisions in the first 6 months of 2024 and of those 48 involved cars which were left hand drive. There have been no fatalities involving left hand drive cars so far in 2024. The following table shows a breakdown of the provisional number of left hand drive car collisions by council area so far in 2024.

Provisional left hand drive car injury collisions , first 6 months of 2024
Council	First 6 months of 2024
Aberdeen City	1
Aberdeenshire	2
Clackmannanshire	1
Dumfries & Galloway	2
East Renfrewshire	1
Edinburgh, City of	10
Fife	4
Glasgow City	8
Highland	3
Midlothian	3
North Ayrshire	2
North Lanarkshire	3
Perth & Kinross	1
Renfrewshire	1
Scottish Borders	2
South Ayrshire	1
South Lanarkshire	2
West Lothian	1
Total	48

The following table shows the number of left hand drive car injury collisions for the period 2018 to 2023.

Left hand drive car injury collisions , 2018 to 2023
Left hand drive
2018	24
2019	71
2020	61
2021	25
2022	56
2023	86

Please note that the figures for 2024 are provisional as they are based on monthly returns received thus far from Police Scotland in 2024, with the most recent returns being received on 13th August 2024. This may be an incomplete picture of casualties up to that date due to a slight lag between records processed by Police Scotland and data availability. These figures are also subject to change due to subsequent corrections and late records.

About FOI

The Scottish Government is committed to publishing all information released in response to Freedom of Information requests. View all FOI responses at http://www.gov.scot/foi-responses.

FOI 202400422572 - Information released - Annex A and B

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