20 cars with the highest driver death rates
Buying a car requires weighing the importance of several different factors, from miles per gallon to a sleek design to the all-important price. Chief among these considerations is safety, one of the biggest determining factors for most car buyers. Though recent reports from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration show car accident fatalities have declined in recent years, dropping by 3.2% between the first half of 2023 and the first half of 2024, car safety remains a key concern. A 2023 S&P Global Mobility survey of 7,700 drivers around the world found that 81% of people are willing to pay more money for a car if it has higher safety ratings.
For many drivers, safety really comes into play in the event that you get into a crash. Ideally, you want a vehicle that will protect you from harm, even if you end up hitting another car or an obstacle. To find out which cars on the market statistically performed worse in accidents, Stacker used data from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety to find the 20 passenger vehicles with the highest driver death rates.
Death rates are measured as estimated driver deaths per 1 million registered vehicle years, each of which is measured as one vehicle registered for one year. Rates are also adjusted based on driver ages and genders. Any ties were broken by the rate of multiple-vehicle crashes that resulted in driver deaths. The overall death rate for passenger vehicles is about 36 per million registration years, or 26 per 10 billion vehicle miles traveled, according to the data.
The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety released the data in May 2020, primarily comparing 2017 vehicle models, but expanded results to earlier model years for more data in cases where the vehicle wasn't substantially redesigned during that time. Death rate estimates were created using statistical modeling, which is prone to some level of error: Confidence interval ranges are provided, and the actual values have a 95% chance of being within that range based on the institute's analysis.
Keep reading to discover which models have the highest driver death rates—it might be important information to consider next time you take a car out for a test drive.
