10,000 road deaths in six months as industry minister seeks to delay car safety rules

Road crashes killed 10,357 people in Iran in the first six months of the Iranian year 1405 (21 March to 22 September 2026), and 224,220 injured people were referred to the forensic medicine service. The figures were released as Mohammad Atabak, the Islamic Republic's minister of industry, mines and trade, asked on Friday, 6 November, for the new vehicle safety standards to be postponed by at least a year.

According to the Islamic Republic's Forensic Medicine Organisation, the number of deaths fell by only 0.4% compared with the same period last year (10,401), while the number of injured rose by 10.8%. Eighteen percent of those killed, or 1,868 people, were young people aged 18 to 24, and 455 children aged 10 or under also died in these crashes.

78,000 deaths in four years

Road deaths rose from 16,778 in the Iranian year 1400 (2021-22) to 19,490 in 1401 and 20,045 in 1402, and stayed above 19,000 in 1403 and 1404. The total for the four years from 1401 to 1404 comes to 78,510.

Turkey, with a population close to Iran's, recorded around 6,000 road deaths in 2025 according to its statistics office, less than a third of Iran's toll. The Islamic Republic's traffic police have estimated the economic cost of crashes at 7% to 8% of GDP.

The industry minister's letter seeking a delay

In a letter to Mohammad Reza Aref, the first vice-president, Mohammad Atabak cited foreign-currency problems, "emergency conditions" and carmakers' inability to invest in redesigning their platforms, and asked that the new standards, which raise the number of vehicle safety requirements from 85 to 122, be pushed back by at least a year. He also asked for fuel-consumption standards to be postponed.

Teymour Hosseini, head of the traffic police, had earlier called the low safety of domestically built cars one of the causes of road deaths and said that higher fines alone are not enough. By contrast, Mostafa Mirsalim, a member of the Expediency Discernment Council, on Sunday, 8 November blamed the deaths on bad driving and called criticism of the quality of domestic cars a "baseless accusation" against carmakers.

The Forensic Medicine Organisation says that from the start of the Iranian year 1400 (March 2021) to the end of September 2026, more than 100,000 people were killed in crashes and more than two million injured.

While nearly 20,000 Iranians die on the roads every year, the Islamic Republic's industry minister has asked for car safety standards to be delayed.