New IIHS report finds smaller, more powerful vehicles lead to more driver deaths

More than half of the model year 2023 vehicles with the highest driver death rates are small cars, sports cars, or muscle cars, according to a new report from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS).

“Even the safest small cars don’t fare well in crashes with large pickups and heavy SUVs,” said IIHS President David Harkey in a press release. “Powerful engines and marketing that attracts aggressive drivers is the issue for sports cars and muscle cars. They’re dangerous mainly because of how they’re driven.”

IIHS has been calculating driver death rates approximately every three years since 1989. The rates include driver deaths because all vehicles on the road have drivers, but not all 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 Mobility Global.

This year is the second time IIHS also calculated the “other-driver death rate” — the number of drivers in other vehicles killed in crashes with each model, the release states.

IIHS says size and power define the worst models on that list too, but the larger vehicles are most dangerous to others. In fact, IIHS found that half of the top 20 are large or very large pickups, including several heavy-duty variants with more powerful engines.

Across all makes and models, the average driver death rate was 37 drivers per million registration years, according to IIHS’s data. The average other-driver death rate was 53. The other-driver death rate was most likely higher than the driver death rate because many of the crash partner vehicles were of older vintage and offered occupants less protection, the release states.

The model with the highest driver death rate was the Kia Rio, with 170 deaths per million registration years. The Ram 3500 crew cab long bed four-wheel-drive had the highest other-driver death rate, at 204 deaths per million registration years.

The Chevrolet Camaro, Chevrolet Malibu, and the two-wheel-drive versions of the Dodge Charger and Dodge Charger HEMI are the models with the highest driver death rates and those with the highest other-driver death rates.

Eighteen of the 20 models with the lowest driver death rates are SUVs, including four small, nine midsize, four large, and one very large model. Six models had zero death rates.

All but 1 of 6 models of vehicles with the lowest driver and other-driver death rates are luxury SUVs.

Models on both lists are all 4WD and include the BMW X5, BMW X7, Porsche Cayenne, Volkswagen Atlas, Volvo XC60, and Volvo XC90.

The latest rates are based on fatalities that occurred from 2021-2024 for vehicles from the 2023 model year as well as earlier models with the same designs and features.

The numbers represent the estimated risks for 2023 models, but the data include models back to 2020 if the vehicles weren’t substantially redesigned over the intervening period. Including older, equivalent vehicles expands the sample size and increases the reliability of the results, IIHS says.

The release notes that, to be included, vehicle models must have had at least 100,000 registered vehicle years of exposure from 2021-2024 or at least 20 deaths, meaning certain models with the same characteristics as those with the highest driver or other-driver death rates weren’t evaluated.

Models with too little exposure for individual estimates are included in the overall rates for vehicle size and class, such as small cars or large SUVs. IIHS says that because those rates are based on much larger samples, they are more reliable safety indicators than the estimates for individual models.

“Driver death rates are a useful companion to the Institute’s safety ratings, as they capture different aspects of risk,” the IIHS release states. “In the Institute’s front crash tests, vehicles are propelled into a stationary barrier at 40 mph, so the kinetic energy involved in the crash is determined by the vehicle’s own weight. That makes IIHS safety ratings useful for comparing vehicles in the same size category but not for comparing small and large cars or cars and SUVs.

“In contrast, driver death rates can be compared across vehicle classes. However, they don’t only reflect the properties of the vehicles themselves. The crash database includes driver age and gender, allowing analysts to adjust the rates to account for the fact that men are involved in more crashes than women and older drivers are more likely to be killed in a given crash than young ones, for example. They are not adjusted for other factors that might influence fatality rates, such as the speeds people drive and the number of miles they travel per day.”

IIHS adds that low death rates for luxury vehicles and high death rates for cheaper models most likely illustrate that difference; however, luxury models can be equipped with more cutting-edge safety features than some less expensive cars.

“It is possible, for example, that even when the data are adjusted for age, a greater proportion of new or inexperienced drivers choose cheaper vehicles,” IIHS says. “Those working double shifts or multiple jobs may also log more miles per day than more affluent drivers. Differences in driver behavior most likely also explain why death rates are lower for ordinary cars than for sports cars and muscle cars and lower still for wagons.”

IIHS also notes that while its safety ratings don’t differentiate between two-wheel-drive and four-wheel-drive variants of vehicles, driver death rate analyses are treated as two distinct models.

“That’s because the driver death rates are based on real-world experience, so how and where the vehicles are driven makes a difference,” the release states. “On snow-covered roads and in other conditions, this experience may be different for two-wheel-drive and four-wheel-drive versions. The four-wheel-drive versions also cost more than their two-wheel-drive counterparts.”

Harkey added that while size and power matter, so do vehicle crashworthiness and effective crash-avoidance systems.

“But these results are also a reminder that a big part of how safe you are behind the wheel depends on how safely you drive,” he said in the release.

Last June, IIHS reported that the forward blind zones of six top-selling passenger vehicles had grown substantially over the past 25 years, as pedestrian and bicyclist fatalities have soared.

A study led by researchers at the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Volpe Center was the first to use a new IIHS method to measure a driver’s direct area of vision around a vehicle.

IIHS said the technique promises to enable much broader studies of the role that vehicle design plays in driver visibility and crash risk.

Model years 1997-2023 Chevrolet Suburban, Ford F-150, Honda Accord, Honda CR-V, Jeep Grand Cherokee, and Toyota Camry vehicles were examined in the study.

Throughout the multiple redesign cycles for those model years, forward visibility within a 10-meter radius decreased 58% for the three SUVs, according to IIHS. The F-150’s close-proximity visibility declined by 17%, but even the earliest model had “extremely large” blind zones. In contrast, early models of the Accord and Camry had relatively good visibility, which fell by less than 8% in later generations.

Later that year, IIHS reported that vehicles with large driver-side blind zones are much more likely to strike crossing pedestrians while turning left than those with small blind zones.

A large driver-side blind zone raises the risk of a left-turn pedestrian crash by 70% compared with a small blind zone. Medium driver-side blind zones were associated with a 59% increase in the risk of left-turn crashes.

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Featured image and charts provided by IIHS