The crash that nearly ended Peter Kalbfell's life happened on a long, deserted highway in outback Queensland.
"There is a lot of nothing out there, you know," he said.
"Miles and miles and miles of nothing."
In January 2000, Mr Kalbfell was driving back home to Alice Springs after a "whirlwind" Christmas holiday with family and friends in Maryborough, three hours north of Brisbane.
It was a trip he and his then-girlfriend had made countless times before, which, he conceded, led them to "be a bit more complacent" about driving while fatigued.
With his girlfriend behind the wheel, Mr Kalbfell undid his seatbelt to get more comfortable.
He does not remember what happened next.
Police later told him the car had veered off the road and rolled seven or eight times, crushing him underneath.
The crash rendered him an incomplete quadriplegic: paralysed from the neck down except for minimal movement in his arms and legs.
Mr Kalbfell's girlfriend sustained minor injuries.
Rural road deaths increasing
While the pair survived, a new report has identified an increasing number of fatal crashes on rural and regional roads.
An analysis by the Australian Road Safety Foundation (ARSF) found 906 people died on roads outside the capital cities in 2025, a 10.5 per cent increase on 2024.
The ARSF understands this to be the highest number of regional fatalities since 2020.
Deaths on rural, regional and remote roads made up nearly 70 per cent of the national road toll in 2025, despite only about 25 per cent of the population living in those locations.
The study released last month found complacency was one of the main causes of risk-taking on regional roads, with many drivers saying they broke road rules because they believed it was safe to do so on familiar roads.
ARSF president Russell White said drivers needed to take more responsibility for their own safety.
Mr White said some simple techniques could help to disrupt complacency and improve driver awareness and responsiveness on the road.
Ioni Lewis is an expert in driver psychology at the Queensland University of Technology.
She said the ARSF findings correlated with a "longstanding overrepresentation" of road trauma in regional and remote areas.
The overrepresentation of regional fatalities became evident when the federal government began breaking down road crash data by urban and regional areas in 2017
This triggered 2017's Saving Lives on Country Roads throughout New South Wales, which targeted the role of complacency in rural and regional crashes.
"There is that perception that the crashes are because of people who are unfamiliar, they haven't travelled here before," Professor Lewis said.
"But the data certainly doesn't suggest that's the case."
Professor Lewis said the fact that Mr Kalbfell was not wearing a seatbelt prior to his crash was an example of the way safety campaigns need to be targeted at regional audiences.
Professor Lewis said city drivers are more likely to be wearing the seatbelt incorrectly, whereas regional drivers tend not to wear one at all.
"So, if they're saying they're not wearing their seatbelt because there's no-one else on the road, then we need to sort of challenge that idea that it's just you on the road," she said.
"We have to keep up those efforts with really developing resources, developing initiatives that focus on regional and remote Australians and what matters to them."
'It is a trauma that can be stopped'
Fatalities in Mr Kalbfell's home region of the Wide Bay have led Queensland's road toll for the past five years.
Detective Senior Sergeant Wade Lee said he had attended more than 100 crashes in his 35-year career in Wide Bay.
The officer himself was the victim of a head-on collision while on duty on a rainy day in 2021.
Senior Sergeant Lee said the other vehicle lost control in the wet conditions and collided with his unmarked police car, which was then rear-ended by a semi-trailer.
While he is no longer a first responder, he says his officers attend crashes daily, often delivering heartbreaking news to families.
"It is a trauma that [can] be stopped, if we could change that driver behaviour," he said.
Echoing the ARSF study, Senior Sergeant Lee said complacency was a factor in most crashes in his region.
Passengers played a role in helping to keep the driver present and aware, even when driving on familiar roads, he said.
"Having the courage to say, 'Hey mate, slow down … it's raining,' or 'Mate, there's roadworks up ahead.'
"That in itself is a pretty easy conversation to have."
Senior Sergeant Lee now helps to organise a Rotary young driver's course instructed by Mr Kalbfell.
"We don't want to see anybody go through what I've been through, or what [Wade] has seen on the roads, the carnage," Mr Kalbfell said.
"The message we try and get across is making smart choices, especially in the area that we live in."
