Research claims expensive car owners ‘are less courteous to pedestrians’

A new study has claimed that drivers of expensive cars are less likely to stop and allow pedestrians to cross the road.

According to the study published in Science Direct journal, such people are also likely to flout traffic laws than their counterparts with cheap cars.

To arrive at their conclusion, the researchers from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, sampled a total of 461 cars.

They examined drivers’ attitudinal responses to pedestrians while driving on the road using key indicators including skin colour, gender and cost of car.

In determining that of skin colour and gender, the researchers used one white and one black man, and one white and one black woman.

Findings from the study showed that drivers were more likely to yield for the white and female participants than their black counterparts.

The study also discovered that vehicles stopped 31% of the time for both women and white participants, compared with 24% of the time for men and 25% of the time for black volunteers.

Overall, the researchers found that only 129 of the drivers representing 27.98 percent yielded to pedestrians.

The results, according to CNN, showed that a driver’s likelihood of yielding declines by 3 percent for every $1000 increase in value of their car.

The study also found that expensive car owners “felt a sense of superiority over other road users”, hence making them unlikely to consider pedestrians while driving.

According to the researchers, “disengagement and a lower ability to interpret thoughts and feelings of others along with feelings of entitlement and narcissism may lead to a lack of empathy for pedestrians” among costly car owners.

The findings from the study were in tandem with that of Jan-Erik Lönnqvist, a scholar the the University of Helsinki’s, who also found that drivers of expensive cars are generally “unruly”.

“I had noticed that the ones most likely to run a red light, not give way to pedestrians and generally drive recklessly and too fast were often the ones driving fast German cars,” he had said.

“These personality traits explain the desire to own high-status products, and the same traits also explain why such people break traffic regulations more frequently than others.”