IIHS: ‘Sacrificing safety is not the way to make cars affordable’
While the average new vehicle today costs over $50,000, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety Highway Loss Data Institute (IIHS-HLDI) says sufficiently safety-equipped vehicles come at half that cost.
“You can find a vehicle with state-of-the-art engineering to protect you and your family in the event of a crash, as well as proven technologies to keep you from crashing in the first place,” wrote David Harkey, IIHS-HLDI president.
Five examples Harkey provided are the 2026 Mazda 3 at $24,550, or the 2026 Hyundai Kona, Honda Accord, Toyota Camry, or Subaru Forester, all starting at under $30,000.
“These aren’t bargain basement vehicles,” Harkey wrote. “All five earn the 2025 IIHS Top Safety Pick+ award, the highest accolade we give. All the base models provide the highest level of crash protection along with standard automatic emergency braking with pedestrian detection and standard lane departure warning and prevention. I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend them to my own friends and family.”
He noted that vehicle affordability was a theme of a U.S. House subcommittee hearing on auto safety and innovation last week and said it is expected to be a major subject when auto executives appear before the Senate Commerce Committee on a yet-to-be-determined date.
“Amid these discussions, some people have suggested that safety is too expensive,” Harkey wrote. “They want to abandon the development of lifesaving technologies and halt efforts to expand access to them. But as the examples above make clear, a safe car doesn’t have to cost a lot. Giving up on safety progress, on the other hand, will have very real costs — in terms of both dollars and lives.”
He added that while safety innovations aren’t free, coming at costs associated with new components and integrating them into vehicles, the benefits in terms of crashes prevented or mitigated and fatalities or injuries avoided far outweigh these costs.
“In 2019, for example, the societal value of federal motor vehicle safety standards outpaced their cost to consumers by a factor of 23 to 1, according to an analysis by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration,” Harkey wrote. “The agency calculated the cost to consumers at $38 billion, while the societal value, which includes both economic costs and lost quality of life, totaled $881 billion. That is a sound return on investment that can be measured in dollars but means so much more in lives saved and harm prevented.”
Increasing prices are also due to paying more for convenience features such as hands-free power liftgates, puddle lights, and automatically retracting mirrors and gravitating toward larger vehicles, Harkey wrote.
“Even those who buy less expensive models often choose to load them with optional features that have nothing to do with safety,” he wrote.
“Despite the remarkable progress made in vehicle safety, the U.S. lags behind other developed nations in reducing traffic fatalities, and in recent years, road deaths have been trending the wrong way.”
Harkey contends that IIHS’s 30×30 vision will put the country back on the right track by cutting road deaths 30% by 2030.
“Doing so will require policy changes to address risky behavior such as speeding and impaired driving, and changes to infrastructure to improve pedestrian and bicyclist safety,” he wrote. “It will also require us to double down on vehicle safety, preserving recent gains and continuing to push for advancements. Automakers should absolutely look for ways to cut costs for consumers, but not at the expense of people’s lives.”
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