The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety has been calculating driver death rates approximately every three years since 1989, and also calculated the best and worst models according to the number of drivers in other vehicles killed in crashes with them on its last study:
Six of the 21 vehicles with the highest driver death rates for model year 2020 are variants of the Chevrolet Camaro, Dodge Challenger, Dodge Charger and Ford Mustang, while eight others are small cars or minicars. Eighteen of the 23 vehicles with the lowest driver death rates are minivans or SUVs, and 12 are luxury vehicles.
“We typically find that smaller vehicles have high driver death rates because they don’t provide as much protection, especially in crashes with larger, heavier SUVs and pickups,” said IIHS President David Harkey. “The muscle cars on this list highlight that a vehicle’s image and how it is marketed can also contribute to crash risk.”
That might not be how I’d phrase it.
But three Dodge muscle cars with excessively high driver death rates also rank among the worst performers when it comes to other-driver deaths, suggesting these vehicles are driven in an aggressive manner.
Seven of the 20 vehicles with the highest other-driver death rates are large or very large pickups, and four more are midsize SUVs — categories that aren’t represented among the models with the worst track record for protecting their own drivers. Seven of the vehicles with the highest other-driver death rates also rank among the worst for driver death rates: the Dodge Challenger two-wheel-drive, Dodge Charger two-wheel-drive, Dodge Charger HEMI two-wheel-drive, Kia Forte, Kia Optima, Kia Rio sedan and Nissan Altima.
The list of vehicles with the lowest other-driver death rates include two small, two midsize and one large car, as well as six small and 10 midsize SUVs. Ten models are luxury vehicles.
The rates include only driver deaths because all vehicles on the road have drivers, but not all of them have passengers or the same number of passengers. The number of deaths is derived from the federal Fatality Analysis Reporting System. Registration data come from IHS Markit.
The latest rates are based on fatalities that occurred from 2018 to 2021 for vehicles from the 2020 model year, as well as earlier models with the same designs and features. The numbers represent the estimated risks for 2020 models, but the data include models from as far back as 2017 if the vehicles have not been substantially redesigned over the intervening period. Including these older, equivalent vehicles makes the sample size larger and therefore increases the reliability of the results. To be included, a vehicle must have had at least 100,000 registered vehicle years of exposure from 2018 to 2021 or at least 20 deaths.
[…]
The lists of vehicles with the lowest driver and other-driver death rates have nine models in common. These include the Acura MDX four-wheel-drive, Audi Q5 four-wheel-drive, Chevrolet Traverse four-wheel-drive, Lexus RX 350 four-wheel-drive, Mercedes-Benz E-Class sedan four-wheel-drive, Porsche Macan, Subaru Ascent, Toyota C-HR and Volvo XC60 four-wheel-drive. Notably, six of those are luxury vehicles.
“The models that rank among the best and worst performers on both lists point to the unfortunate fact that vehicle cost remains a factor in road safety,” Harkey said.
Vehicle cost — or driver income?
Minicars had the highest driver death rates, averaging 153 deaths per million registered vehicle years. Very large luxury cars had the lowest, averaging only 4 deaths. In contrast, very large pickups had the highest other-driver death rates, averaging 121 deaths, while small sports cars had the fewest other-driver deaths, averaging only 11 per million registered vehicle years.
The average other-driver death rate for all 2020 and equivalent models was 53 deaths per million registered vehicle years. There are more other-driver fatalities than driver fatalities because these newer models are more crashworthy than many of their crash counterparts, which come from the wider U.S. fleet, made up of mostly older vehicles.
(Hat tip to Grasspunk.)
See also: https://web.archive.org/web/20190514171716/www.reviewjournal.com/opinion/administration-plans-100000-new-highway-deaths/
So, Japanese cars dominate the low death rate category, and American cars dominate the high death rate category.
The amount of design devoted to safety in modern cars is really quite large. I suspect the most important variable here is driver behavior.
Don’t discount the human factor. In my part of the world, kids — barely out of short pants — once they qualify to drive, go and buy the cheapest car they can (which translates as often the smallest, least well-built) and drive like they were about to win an F1 race.
When every stop light and junction is regarded as a challenge, hard to see how you can lower the casualty rate.
Albion:
Hell, yeah!