American muscle cars with high horsepower and a hot rod image are among the deadliest vehicles on the road, both for their own drivers and for people in other vehicles, according to new data from Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS).
Six of the 21 vehicles with the highest driver death rates for model year 2020 are variants of the Chevrolet Camaro, Dodge Challenger, Dodge Charger and Ford Mustang, while eight others are small cars or minicars. Eighteen of the 23 vehicles with the lowest driver death rates are minivans or SUVs, and 12 are luxury vehicles.
“We typically find that smaller vehicles have high driver death rates because they don’t provide as much protection, especially in crashes with larger, heavier SUVs and pickups,” said IIHS President David Harkey. “The muscle cars on this list highlight that a vehicle’s image and how it is marketed can also contribute to crash risk.”
IIHS has been calculating driver death rates approximately every three years since 1989. This year for the first time IIHS also calculated the best and worst models according to the number of drivers in other vehicles killed in crashes with them.
