When it comes to driver death rates, large luxury SUVs tend to be much safer than small economy cars, a new study from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety says.
It's pretty much common sense that a burly SUV will fare better in a crash than a pint-sized sedan, but it's still notable that — even after years of research and development in safety technology — size has such a significant impact on fatality rates.
The IIHS studied driver deaths that occurred from 2015-2018 in vehicles from the 2017 model year, along with previous-model-year vehicles with the same design. It found that the 20 safest models were dominated by minivans, large and very large SUVs, and luxury cars. Luxury vehicles, the IIHS noted, tend to come with advanced safety features like blind-spot warning and lane-departure prevention that aren't standard in all cars.
The least safe models, on the other hand, were almost all small cars such as the Fiat 500, Ford Fiesta, and Nissan Versa. But there were some notable exceptions; the IIHS found that the Nissan Leaf and Volkswagen Golf — neither of which is large or luxurious — both had very low rates of driver death.
Below you can check out the 20 safest models, ranked by driver death rate per million registered vehicle years. A registered vehicle year refers to one vehicle registered for one year, and the average rate across all 2017 models was found to be 36 deaths. The worst performer had 141.