Cars Kill Trillions of Bugs Each Year, Study Reveals

We’ve all been through that strange moment where we’re driving along, minding our own business and an insect suddenly smashes into the windscreen right in front of the driver. However sad it might actually be, we rarely give a second thought to the event and just keep driving along. The only real problem is cleaning the front of the car that’s been splattered all over after a long highway trip.

A study from a Dutch biologist named Arnold van Vliet might change our perspective a bit and should enlighten us on what is the misery of an insect’s life. The scientist wanted to put an exact number to the bug fatalities, so he asked for a little help from 250 Dutch drivers. They were asked to drive as normal, and after finishing the journey count the number of kills they tallied. The result: 17.836 bugs were killed per week by the group, which traveled a total of 19,184 miles.

That doesn’t sound like a lot, but the results need to be extrapolated to the whole of car's body and all the vehicles in the world. “In 2007, over 7 million cars [in the Netherlands] traveled about 200 billion kilometers. If we assume for simplicity that every month the average is the same for all cars, then 16.7 billion kilometers are traveled a month. In just the license plates, 3.3 billion bugs are killed per month. The front of the car is at least forty times as large as the surface of the plate. This means that cars hit around 133 billion insects every month. In half a year, that is 800 billion insects. This is significantly more than we had estimated six weeks ago,” Tree Hugger reports.

A similar number of insects were added up by a study in Britain, so it could be considered the figure can be extrapolated to the whole world. A bit of simple math shows that the an impressive 32.5 trillion (yes, with a ‘t’) insects could potentially be killed by the 200 million cars on US roads.