Nissan Motor Company has pulled a car commercial focused on speeding and reckless driving, much to the pleasure of the American Society of Safety Engineers, which had protested to Nissan that the TV ad "wrongly glamorizes speed in many ways including showing a car running through a railroad crossing — with the train just about to pass and the crossing arms down."

Nissan contacted ASSE and said, "This particular commercial was pulled from rotation... and will no longer be run on TV or on the company's public web site."

Motor vehicle accidents are the number one cause of accidental death in the U.S. with 42,800 people dying in 2004 on the roads and hundreds of thousands more being injured. Also, transportation crashes are the number one cause of on-the-job deaths annually. Speeding is one of the most prevalent factors contributing to traffic crashes according to a recent Department of Transportation technical report.

"Your ad's target demographics (males aged 15-24) make up the largest segment of traffic crash fatalities," ASSE President Jack Dobson wrote in a letter to Nissan. "Every month, about 1,000 fatalities are caused by speeding-related motor vehicle crashes and your ad condones this behavior."