Muscle Cars, Small Cars Both Tend toward High Driver Death Rates

• We've long heard that smaller vehicles are more dangerous for occupants in a crash, and IIHS's latest driver death rate study again confirms this fact.

• But this time, IIHS did something a bit different. It also looked at "other driver" deaths, or the fatality rate of drivers in vehicles hit by a specific model. Through this lens, muscle cars jumped out as some of the deadliest on our roads.

• The IIHS's working theory is that muscle-car drivers are inclined to drive more aggressively, which is why these vehicles are involved in more deaths than similarly powerful luxury vehicles.

Anyone can drive a dangerous car in a safe manner or a safe car recklessly. But the data shows that certain vehicles somehow inspire drivers to take more risks, causing higher death rates. A new study reveals two types of vehicles with high driver death rates: muscle cars and small vehicles.

The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) just released its latest analysis of driver deaths by make and model, as reported in the federal Fatality Analysis Reporting System. IIHS has conducted this data survey roughly every three years since 1989, with this most recent report looking at fatalities from 2018 to 2021 in 2020 model vehicles and "earlier models with the same designs and features." In some cases, that includes vehicles back to the 2017 model year. IIHS used this large sample size to analyze driver deaths in two categories. First is the death rate in vehicles with at least 100,000 registered vehicle years of exposure from 2018 to 2021. Second, models that had at least 20 deaths.

IIHS focuses on driver deaths in these triennial surveys for a reason: it allows for an apples-to-apples comparison because "all vehicles on the road have drivers, but not all of them have passengers or the same number of passengers," IIHS said in its release. Driver death rates are another way to understand a vehicle's real-world safety capabilities alongside crash tests and ratings.

Cars with Highest Driver Death Rates

So, which models are the most dangerous? In previous data surveys, IIHS was—unsurprisingly—able to find evidence of the greater dangers of small vehicles. But for the new 2020 model year study, six of the 21 vehicles with the highest driver death rates are muscle cars, including Chevrolet Camaro, Dodge Challenger, Dodge Charger, and Ford Mustang variants.

IIHS included these muscle cars in its rankings this time because of a change in the definition of "driver deaths." Previously, IIHS only looked at whether a driver of a car involved in a crash had been killed. For its latest analysis, IIHS also factored in the number of drivers in other vehicles killed in crashes. In other words, in a hypothetical crash between a Charger and a Honda Fit where the Fit driver died, that fatality would be attributed to the Fit in previous IIHS studies, furthering the "small cars are more dangerous" message. In the new study, the death would also be connected to the Charger using this "other driver" metric.