Small Cars and Sports Cars Have the Highest Driver Death Rates, IIHS Finds

A new report from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety puts hard numbers behind a fact many drivers already sense at a stoplight next to a full-size pickup: the vehicle a person chooses to drive plays a direct role in whether they survive a serious crash, and in whether the person in the other car survives too.

What the IIHS Found

IIHS has calculated driver death rates roughly every three years starting in 1989, and the newest numbers cover model year 2023 vehicles, using fatality data from 2021 through 2024 pulled from the federal Fatality Analysis Reporting System, matched against registration data from Mobility Global. More than half of the vehicles with the highest driver death rates in this report are small cars, sports cars or muscle cars.

The Kia Rio topped the list with a driver death rate of 170 deaths per million registration years, the highest of any vehicle IIHS evaluated. The Chevrolet Camaro, Chevrolet Malibu, and the two-wheel-drive Dodge Charger and Charger HEMI also landed among the vehicles with the highest driver death rates. Across every make and model in the study, the average driver death rate came out to 37 deaths per million registration years.

“Even the safest small cars don’t fare well in crashes with large pickups and heavy SUVs,” IIHS President David Harkey said in the organization’s 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.”

The Other Side of the Equation: Who Large Trucks Endanger

For the second time, IIHS also calculated what it calls the other-driver death rate, meaning the number of people killed in other vehicles after a crash with a given model. The average other-driver death rate across all vehicles came out to 53 deaths per million registration years, higher than the average driver death rate, largely a reflection of older, less protective vehicles making up many of the vehicles struck in these crashes.

Large and very large pickups dominate this half of the list. The Ram 3500 crew cab, long bed, four-wheel-drive variant recorded the highest other-driver death rate IIHS measured, at 204 deaths per million registration years, more than five times the vehicle average. Half of the 20 models with the worst other-driver death rates are large or heavy-duty pickups, several of them higher-horsepower trims.

That combination, a compact car with the highest risk to its own driver and a heavy-duty pickup with the highest risk to everyone else on the road, illustrates a mismatch that has been building for years as the average new vehicle sold in the US has grown larger, heavier and more powerful.

Which Vehicles Score Best

SUVs dominate the safer end of the list. Eighteen of the 20 models with the lowest driver death rates are SUVs, spanning four small, nine midsize, four large and one very large model, and six of those models recorded a death rate of zero in the study period. Luxury SUVs stand out even further: all but one of the six models with the lowest combined driver and other-driver death rates are luxury SUVs, including the BMW X5, BMW X7, Porsche Cayenne, Volkswagen Atlas, Volvo XC60 and Volvo XC90, all evaluated in their four-wheel-drive configurations.

IIHS cautions against reading the SUV advantage as purely about size. Luxury models in this group tend to come loaded with more advanced crash-avoidance technology than cheaper vehicles, and the driver population buying them skews toward older, more experienced drivers who tend to log fewer aggressive-driving miles. “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,” the IIHS release states, adding that drivers working multiple jobs may also put more miles on cheaper cars per day than more affluent drivers do.

Why This Data Differs From a Crash Test Score

IIHS is careful to separate driver death rates from its familiar crash test ratings. In a front crash test, a vehicle is propelled into a stationary barrier at 40 mph, so the kinetic energy involved comes entirely from that one vehicle’s own mass. That makes crash test ratings useful for comparing same-size vehicles against each other, but not for comparing a small car against a large SUV, where the two vehicles carry very different amounts of mass into a real-world collision.

Driver death rates fill that gap by drawing on real crashes between real vehicles of every size, adjusted for driver age and gender to account for the fact that men are involved in more crashes than women, and that older drivers face higher fatality risk in a given crash than younger drivers do. The rates are not adjusted for how fast people drive or how many miles they log per year, two factors that likely explain part of why sports cars and muscle cars post such high numbers even with modern safety equipment on board.

IIHS also treats two-wheel-drive and four-wheel-drive versions of the same model as separate entries, as real-world driving conditions, especially in snow, differ between the two, and four-wheel-drive trims tend to cost more and attract a different type of buyer.

What This Means for Buyers and Insurance Shoppers

Insurers already price risk into premiums using data like this, and the same models showing elevated death rates in this report tend to carry higher liability exposure for insurers covering the other driver in a crash. A shopper cross-referencing IIHS driver death rates against a vehicle they are considering gets a second, independent data point beyond a crash test score or a marketing brochure’s safety claims.

Harkey pointed out that the vehicle itself only tells part of the story. “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. Vehicle size, crashworthiness and modern crash-avoidance technology all matter, but driving habits, speed and how often a car shares the road with much larger vehicles still shape the outcome of any individual crash. The full report, including the complete rankings by model, is available on the IIHS website.

How This Compares With Past IIHS Studies

IIHS has run this exercise roughly every three years going back to 1989, and the same broad pattern shows up nearly every cycle: small, light vehicles carry higher risk for the person driving them, while large, heavy vehicles carry higher risk for the people they hit. What has shifted over time is the gap between the two ends of the list. As pickups and SUVs have grown heavier and more powerful across successive model generations, the other-driver death rate for the largest trucks has climbed rather than leveled off, even as federal crash test standards and driver-side safety technology have improved across nearly every vehicle class. IIHS researchers have flagged this widening gap in earlier status reports, tying it to the years-long trend of average curb weights climbing across nearly every US vehicle segment, from compact cars up through full-size trucks.

A Practical Guide for Shoppers

For someone cross-shopping vehicles this fall, the IIHS data points to a few concrete takeaways. A model that appears on the list of lowest combined driver and other-driver death rates, many of them midsize and small SUVs, offers a real safety edge in mixed traffic that includes both compact cars and heavy trucks. A car buyer drawn to a sports car or muscle car trim should factor in that the elevated death rate tied to those models reflects driving behavior as much as vehicle design, meaning a disciplined driver in a Camaro or Charger faces a different real-world risk than the aggregate number suggests. Someone shopping for a heavy-duty pickup for towing or work use should recognize that the added mass protecting them in a crash comes at a cost to whoever they hit, a tradeoff that shows up clearly in the report’s other-driver figures.

None of this replaces a test drive or a look at a vehicle’s individual IIHS crash test ratings, but it adds a layer of real-world crash outcome data that a showroom sticker or a manufacturer’s safety brochure will not show. The full model-by-model rankings, including vehicles not mentioned here, are published on the IIHS website for anyone comparing a specific shortlist before a purchase.

Sources:

• IIHS: Driver Death Rates Remain High for Small Cars, Models With Powerful Engines
• Repairer Driven News: New IIHS Report Finds Smaller, More Powerful Vehicles Lead to More Driver Deaths
• Insurify: Supersize Pickups, Muscle Cars, and Small Cars Are Deadliest Vehicles