In the mid-1990s, I opted to lease a Toyota 4Runner after reading a series of alarming pieces by Keith Bradsher, then an auto writer for The New York Times. Bradsher warned that drivers of small and midsize sedans faced a heightened risk of severe injury or death because of the explosive growth of increasingly massive trucks and SUVs.
At the time, I was commuting from Manhattan into New Jersey, sharing roadways with some of the most aggressive drivers on the East Coast.
I neither wanted nor needed an SUV, but the physics of my daily commute led me to a cold calculation: I needed to improve my automotive survival odds.
I nicknamed my vehicle the “Bradshermobile,” a detail I later shared with a prominent auto journalist who knew Bradsher well and admired his work. She didn’t take kindly to the anecdote.
“Keith didn’t write those stories to encourage people to go out and buy SUVs,” she snapped. “He intended the exact opposite.”
She was right about his intent but wrong about the market reality.
Bradsher’s warnings created a collective-action problem. Individually, it made perfect sense for motorists who could afford larger vehicles to buy them. Collectively, every additional truck and SUV made the roadways more dangerous for people who couldn’t afford, or didn’t want, to join the automotive arms race.
Bradsher’s early reporting relied on the immutable laws of physics and emerging federal collision data. In 2002, he expanded his arguments into High and Mighty: SUVs—The World’s Most Dangerous Vehicles and How They Got That Way, detailing how automakers exploited regulatory loopholes to transform heavy light-truck platforms into immensely profitable family haulers.
More than two decades later, Bradsher’s central warning hasn’t merely aged well. It has evolved into a structural public-health crisis that government has largely tolerated.
The latest real-world fatality statistics from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety confirm that America’s roadways have devolved into a two-tiered safety system.
Those who can afford large luxury SUVs and expensive pickups can buy into vehicle classes with some of the lowest driver death rates IIHS records. Meanwhile, motorists driving inexpensive subcompacts and sedans suffer dramatically higher fatality rates, although IIHS cautions that vehicle design, mileage and driver behavior all influence the results.
“Even the safest small cars don’t fare well in crashes with large pickups and heavy SUVs,” IIHS President David Harkey acknowledged in announcing the findings.
That is the essence of America’s auto safety divide. Wealth buys mass, height, advanced safety technology, and better odds of surviving a collision. Those who cannot afford those protections are expected to share the road with those who can.
The most damning measure in the new IIHS report is the “other-driver death rate,” which calculates the number of motorists in other vehicles killed in crashes involving a specific model.
Here, the transferred risk becomes impossible to ignore.
Ten of the 20 models with the highest other-driver death rates are large or very large pickups. Stellantis and General Motors manufacture 14 of the 20 vehicles on the list. Stellantis alone accounts for nine.
The Ram 3500 crew cab long bed four-wheel-drive recorded the highest other-driver death rate by far: 204 deaths per million registered vehicle years.
That means the vehicles providing some of the greatest protection to their own occupants can pose some of the gravest danger to everyone around them.
The Ford F-150 SuperCrew two-wheel-drive illustrates the contradiction. It recorded only seven driver deaths per million registered vehicle years, placing it among the safest vehicles for its own driver. It simultaneously recorded 99 other-driver deaths, placing it among the most dangerous vehicles for the people its drivers hit.
Private protection. Publicly transferred risk.
GM’s showing on the other-driver death list also sits awkwardly beside CEO Mary Barra’s relentlessly recycled corporate pledge of “Zero Crashes, Zero Emissions, Zero Congestion.”
It isn’t just sheer mass killing people. Horsepower matters too.
Performance models, including Stellantis’s Dodge Charger and GM’s Chevrolet Camaro, rank among the vehicles with the highest death rates for other drivers. While pickup lethality is heavily influenced by mass, frame height and structural incompatibility, muscle-car lethality is also driven by automakers selling extraordinary acceleration and horsepower for use on ordinary public roads.
“Size and power matter, as do vehicle crashworthiness and effective crash avoidance systems,” Harkey noted. “But these results are also a reminder that a big part of how safe you are behind the wheel depends on how safely you drive.”
The vehicle whose drivers face the highest statistical risk of death is the Kia Rio, at 170 deaths per million registered vehicle years. The Nissan Versa follows closely at 164.
Hyundai and Kia combined for six of the 20 models with the highest driver death rates. Nissan and Stellantis accounted for five each, GM had three, and Subaru’s compact Impreza rounded out the list.
Six models recorded no driver deaths in the IIHS analysis. Four were luxury SUVs: the Audi Q7, BMW X7, Mercedes-Benz GLB-Class, and Mercedes-Benz GLE-Class. The other two were the Chevrolet Tahoe and Toyota Tundra CrewMax, hardly entry-level transportation.
The zero-death club has a formidable cover charge.
Then there’s General Motors.
GM built one of the safest vehicles in the analysis, the four-wheel-drive Chevrolet Tahoe, which recorded no driver deaths. It also built one of the deadliest, the discontinued Chevrolet Malibu, which recorded 116 driver deaths per million registered vehicle years.
The same company built both vehicles.
While many large trucks protect their own occupants by imposing greater danger on others, a select group of vehicles, overwhelmingly midsize and large luxury SUVs, perform well on both measures. They protect their own drivers without generating comparatively high death rates among collision partners.
One vehicle did not qualify for an individual IIHS driver- or other-driver-death-rate estimate because it lacked sufficient exposure: GM’s GMC Hummer EV.
That absence shouldn’t be mistaken for reassurance.
The Hummer EV SUV weighs roughly 9,000 pounds in some configurations and can accelerate from zero to 60 mph with sports-car urgency. GM has placed that combination of extraordinary mass and extraordinary acceleration onto public roads already populated by motorists whom IIHS says are badly overmatched by ordinary large pickups and heavy SUVs.
You don’t need a doctorate in physics to appreciate what happens when a roughly 9,000-pound consumer vehicle collides with a Kia Rio, Nissan Versa or Chevrolet Malibu.
The Hummer EV is arguably among the most irresponsible consumer vehicles ever introduced. Its excess extends beyond collision risk. The American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE), one of the nation’s leading transportation research organizations, ranked the GMC Hummer EV SUV as the ninth least environmentally friendly vehicle sold in America in 2024. Three other GM models—the Cadillac Escalade V, GMC Sierra, and Chevrolet Corvette Z06—also made ACEEE’s list of the nation’s least environmentally friendly vehicles.
GM nevertheless markets the Hummer EV as a symbol of technological and environmental progress. President Joe Biden, who repeatedly warned that climate change had reached “code red” status, hailed the Hummer EV as “one hell of a vehicle, man.”
Mary Barra disclosed in May that the Hummer EV SUV is her daily vehicle.
“I love driving the Hummer SUV—electric vehicle, four-wheel steer—so it’s just a great performance vehicle,” Barra said. “And I get a lot of respect in it. … I wish I had it when my kids were playing soccer; that would be great.”
“I get a lot of respect in it” might be the most revealing statement Barra has ever made.
Respect is an interesting word for the reaction inspired by a roughly 9,000-pound vehicle looming over nearly everything else on the road. Intimidation might be a more accurate one.
Nearly three decades after Bradsher warned of an automotive arms race, Americans with the financial means to do so still protect themselves by purchasing more mass, more height and more power. Those without the means absorb a disproportionate share of the consequences.
Automakers are doing what publicly traded corporations are rewarded for doing: selling highly profitable vehicles consumers want to buy. Affluent consumers are doing what I did in the late 1990s: improving their own survival odds.
Government is the institution that has failed.
For decades, federal regulators and elected officials have known that vehicle weight and crash incompatibility can determine who lives and who dies. Yet they have allowed the automotive arms race to escalate, permitting manufacturers to sell increasingly massive vehicles without adequately accounting for the danger those vehicles impose on everyone else.
America’s founding promise begins with life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
On the nation’s roadways, government has allowed the first of those rights to become increasingly dependent on how much vehicle a person can afford.