The Least Safe Cars On The Road: What To Avoid In North Dakota

It's becoming harder and harder to go car shopping to find something that is safe, dependable, and affordable. However, in your search for new wheels, you may want to pass on buying these cars.

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According to Kelly Blue Book, coming to that conclusion isn't exactly easy for researchers to do, and they even included a list of the vehicles that are the least safe for other drivers on the road if a crash occurs.

Crash Tests Are Imperfect

There is a lot more nuance to vehicle safety than meets the eye. Award systems and star ratings are an effort by safety bodies to make them easier to understand. Unfortunately, there are gaps in the current data that prevent us from compiling a ranking of the safest cars.

As an example, crash tests are not meant to simulate actual collisions. When a safety lab smashes a vehicle into a barrier in a frontal crash test, it mimics the impact of a collision between two vehicles of comparable weight and size. The results of a full-size truck crashing into a tiny SUV are not seen.

What occurs when a truck smashes into a car's doors can be learned from side crash tests. One well-known safety lab now conducts side impact tests using a sled that looks like a pickup. However, its size and height are not customizable.

Another thing that can't be replicated in a lab is that awful intersection on the way to work, where drivers all fail to read the turn signals. Also, in accident tests, one vehicle doesn't trail too closely after the other.

Some of the holes can be filled using data from actual crashes. Crash safety is just as important as car safety, so things get messy.

The Insurance Industry’s Safety Watchdog

Almost every vehicle on American roads has been crash-tested by one of two main safety bodies. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), which is responsible for bestowing the stars, is one such governmental agency. It had no role in this investigation.

The second one is an insurance company-funded safety lab. Your insurance company stands to gain monetarily from an environment free of serious accidents. As a result, a group of insurance companies runs the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) and conducts its own tests.

Another excellent source for studying real-world incidents is the data that the IIHS has access to, which comes from most major insurers. That information was used for this research.

About These Numbers

This week, the IIHS published a list of vehicles ranked by the number of fatalities experienced by their drivers and, by extension, by the drivers of other vehicles they collided with.

"They capture different aspects of risk," the organization explains, adding that the figures "are a useful companion to the Institute's safety ratings." However, there is no definitive number that can tell you which vehicles are the safest.

Since 1989, the IIHS has released statistics on the fatality rate for each vehicle model every three years. For the first time this year, the agency also took the other vehicle's fatality rate into account.

For this year, the statistics 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." Cars from 2017 model years are sometimes included "if the vehicles have not been substantially redesigned over the intervening period."

The Institute adjusted mortality statistics by millions of registered vehicle years to account for the fact that some cars are more prevalent than others.

A Few Trends

A number of patterns emerge from the data, according to the IIHS.

According to IIHS President David Harkey, one common reason why driver fatalities are higher in smaller vehicles is the lack of protection they provide, particularly in collisions with larger and heavier SUVs and pickups.

Take the Mitsubishi Mirage as an example; it has the highest accident fatality rate of any vehicle tested. One of the most affordable new automobiles in the United States is the Mirage. It's a little subcompact automobile that comes in two body styles: sedan and hatchback.

While the current Mirage models had advanced safety features, including automatic emergency braking, these weren't available on the 2020 model.

Nonetheless, the list of cars with the greatest death rate also included some powerful and hefty vehicles. A total of six models from Chevrolet, Dodge, and Ford were named by the IIHS as having the highest driver death rates for the 2020 model year.

Muscle vehicles offer drivers a great deal of power at a reasonable price. The muscle vehicles featured here show how a vehicle's marketing and public perception can increase the likelihood of a collision, according to Harkey.

The passengers in luxury vehicles, on the other hand, are often better protected. The vehicles that do well or poorly on both lists indicate that vehicle cost is still a factor in road safety, which is a sad reality, according to Harkey.

How to Use the Data

According to the government, the overall level of danger on American roadways is on the rise. According to the IIHS's 2017 report, there were 36 fatalities for every million vehicle years on the road. That figure then increased to 38 in 2020.

That is so even if there has been a rise in the prevalence of technological safety measures such as automatic emergency braking.

How then can you safeguard yourself?

It seems that size is a factor in the solution. The IIHS reported that, on average, there were 153 fatalities per million registered vehicle years among drivers of subcompact automobiles. The lowest, with an average of only four deaths, were very large luxury cars.

However, physical size isn't everything. You should probably stay away from pickup vehicles unless absolutely necessary. A truck was six times more likely to kill the other driver than any other vehicle. There is just one truck on this list of vehicles with the lowest driver death rate, and that is the GMC Canyon Crew Cab.

It could be related to the construction of pickup trucks. When driving on rocky terrain, most modern pickups' ladder frames can be bent to keep a wheel from lifting off the ground. However, most SUVs' unibody architecture makes them more crash-resistant.

Spending more can really protect you, which is a bummer. It is common for luxury vehicles to be equipped with crash avoidance systems and other modern safety measures, according to the IIHS.

2017-2021 Cars With the Highest Driver Death Rate

2017-2021 Cars With the Highest Other Driver Death Rate