The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has issued some very early traffic fatality stats for 2015, and we hate to break it to you, but they don’t look so good. In fact, they’re pretty darned depressing.
Official numbers for 2015 won’t be available for a while — likely, the end of 2016, after data has gathered from every corner of the country and sorted for accuracy. But as you can see from the chart above, preliminary figures for the first three months of 2015 show around 7,500 deaths, significantly higher than last year’s estimated 6,850. (Final numbers from 2014 should be published around December.)
