Nine of Australia’s 10 worst crash corridors sit in Melbourne, new AAMI data shows – a collision-frequency pattern that, combined with rising theft costs and a structural fraud problem concentrated in the state’s most common crash type, presents a compounding challenge for insurers pricing Victorian motor risk.
The 2026 AAMI Crash Index, published by AAI Limited trading as AAMI, analysed more than 394,000 motor insurance claims lodged across Australia between January 1 and December 31, 2025. Springvale Road in Glen Waverley, Victoria, ranked first nationally, displacing Plenty Road in Bundoora for the first time in eight years. The index ranks roads by claims volume, not crash severity, identifying corridors where stop-start traffic, signalised intersections, turning movements, and proximity to shopping precincts generate the highest concentration of insurance events. The dataset draws solely from AAI Limited’s own portfolio of brands.
According to the Insurance Council of Australia’s (ICA) 2025 industry snapshot, Australian insurers held 18.2 million motor-related policies and recorded $14.1 billion in motor-related claims across the market in 2024 – context that frames AAMI’s 394,000-claim sample as a material but partial cross-section. Suncorp, which operates AAMI alongside GIO, Bingle, Apia, and Vero, holds approximately 27% of the Australian general insurance market by gross written premium.
Of the 10 roads in the 2026 national list, nine are in Melbourne. Pennant Hills Road in Carlingford, New South Wales, ranked ninth, was the only exception. This is not a new pattern. AAMI’s Decade of Driving Report, which analysed more than 4.3 million motor claims from 2014 to 2023, identified Plenty Road in Bundoora as Australia’s most dangerous crash hotspot across that entire 10-year period and noted that in all states except Tasmania, each state’s No. 1 hotspot had held the top position for more than five of the prior 10 years. The 2026 index adds a change at the top – Springvale Road displacing Plenty Road – but the underlying geographic concentration in Melbourne’s arterial network is unchanged.
AAMI motor prevention manager Mary Kennedy described the pattern in systemic terms. “Nine of Australia’s Top 10 crash hotspots are in Melbourne, which tells us this is not about one bad road. It is a broader pattern across some of our busiest arterial roads,” Kennedy said. Nose-to-tail collisions were the most common crash type on nine of the 10 hotspots and accounted for 28% of all claims in the 2025 dataset nationally, followed by failure to give way at 23%, and collisions with stationary objects at 22%.
The collision-frequency data in the AAMI index sits alongside a separate and deteriorating Victorian motor theft profile. Victoria recorded a 25% increase in motor theft claims and a 37% rise in incurred costs between 2024 and 2025, with a total theft bill of $243 million across more than 12,500 claims – higher than the combined sum of all other states analysed, according to Insurance Statistics Australia data released by the ICA in June 2026. Theft claim frequency in metropolitan Victoria climbed from 0.35% to 0.46% while every other state recorded declines.
That combination – elevated collision frequency across Melbourne’s arterial network and a structurally diverging theft profile – represents a compounding exposure for insurers with material Victorian motor concentration. The ICA’s Motor Insurance Policy Paper, released in March 2025, found comprehensive motor insurance premiums have risen 42% since 2019 to an average of $1,052 per year in 2024, with average claims costs rising in parallel, driven by higher expenses for vehicle replacement, parts, and labour, as well as the growing complexity and penetration of vehicle technology.
The prevalence of nose-to-tail collisions in the AAMI index has a dimension beyond frequency that is relevant to claims teams. The ICA’s Motor Insurance Policy Paper identified motor insurance fraud – including staged accidents and misrepresentations of damage – as a rising cost driver, estimating it cost the industry $560 million in 2023. Rear-end collisions are a recognised feature of some staged accident schemes because liability often falls on the following driver, making them a focus for fraud detection and claims investigation.
The concentration of nose-to-tail claims across Melbourne’s busiest arterial corridors – precisely the environments that also generate the highest overall claims density – means fraud exposure is geographically concentrated in the same locations driving the index’s hotspot rankings. “Most claims aren’t high-speed collisions. They are everyday bingles like nose-to-tail crashes, failure to give way, and collisions with stationary objects, which means they are also among the most preventable,” Kennedy said.
AAMI supplemented claims data with telemetry from 50,123 participants in the AAMI Driver Rewards (ADR) program, tracked via the AAMI App across the same 12-month period. Speeding scored highest at 95.9 out of 100, and distraction avoidance at 87.6. The lowest-scoring behaviours were acceleration (78.6), braking (77.9), and cornering (76.3) – suggesting vehicle-following and intersection-navigation are the primary behavioural risk factors for urban collision frequency, rather than speed. This has direct relevance to how insurers weight variables in usage-based pricing models.
The index identifies drivers aged 65 and over alongside male drivers as the groups with the highest claims involvement. Canstar’s 2025 analysis found drivers aged 50 and over recorded the steepest premium increases of any age group, rising 6.51% on average against a market-wide increase of 5.8%, while the Actuaries Institute has separately noted that non-risk-based pricing factors – including behavioural signals such as the likelihood of switching providers – can disproportionately affect older Australians, raising questions about whether those mechanisms compound the impact of structural age loadings on this cohort. Government figures show more than 795,600 Australians aged 80 and over were still driving in 2025, more than double the number in that age bracket in 2010 – a demographic shift that puts the 65-plus cohort’s claims frequency on a growth trajectory independent of per-driver risk changes.
Beyond the national rankings, the index recorded the leading crash hotspot in each capital: Mains Road in Sunnybank for Brisbane; Albany Highway in Cannington for Perth; North East Road in Modbury for Adelaide, where failure to give way was most common; Sandy Bay Road in Sandy Bay for Hobart, with stationary object collisions most frequent; Hindmarsh Drive in Phillip for Canberra; and Trower Road in Casuarina for Darwin. “Whether you are driving through Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Perth, Adelaide, Hobart, Canberra, or Darwin, the message is the same: leave a safe gap, look further ahead, take extra care at intersections, and avoid rushing through busy traffic,” Kennedy said.
