The Finnish Line

I have a friend from Finland and hearing about her country, her people, her customs, has really made me yearn to experience them first hand by car hire.  In addition to the fact that the roads and scenery are simply magnificent in Finland, I've heard from her that the people are much better drivers than here in Central America where we live.  Today I stumbled upon this great little video from Top Gear:

The Finnish culture seems to have such a fun relationship with the road.  Maybe that's part of why they had less than 400 road fatalities in 2006?  This spurred me to take a look at how we're all driving, and I was surprised to learn that, per 100,000 inhabitants, the United Kingdom is actually almost half as deadly behind the wheel as Finland (3.59 versus 6.6 per 100,000)!  Perhaps public transport has something to do with it?  

Not so shocking was Costa Rica, where I live.  Say your prayers if you rent a car in Costa rica; their rates are a whopping 15.4 per 100,000 inhabitants, thats five times that of the UK.  Although, there are quite a few people who drive daily through very rural roads, in the rainforest, where landslides, blind curves, and animals in the road are all commonplace.  However, with the treacherous road argument Finland's 6.5 deaths per 100,000 seems even more impressive.  Don't they have quite a bit of rural road, icy driving conditions, and more to contend with?  When renting a car in Finland, as always, you should be cautions of road conditions, but at leas you can trust that the local drivers are well adapted to driving on their roads.

The worst on this list was Eritrea, a country I have to admit I know very little about.  According to Wikipedia this country on the horn of Africa suffered around 4,400 road fatalities per 100,000 motor vehicles!  These look like incredibly bad odds to me!