A vehicle safety group has updated its every-three-year study of cars that have the highest rate of fatalities for the drivers.
Chuck Farmer is Vice President for Research with the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. He said when choosing a vehicle, the take home message is "avoid the extremes."
Farmer said very small cars provide less protection in a crash with bigger ones, and very big vehicles are more likely to injure other people.
"If you're the smallest vehicle on the road, one mistake could introduce you to a much bigger vehicle, and we all make mistakes," he said.
Farmer says sports cars and muscle cars also tend to have high rates of driver deaths — because people drive them too aggressively. They also tend to show up on another list — cars that are involved in crashes that take the lives of the other driver.
"These cars that make you want to drive fast are risky to you and everybody else on the road," Farmer said.
Farmer said crash test ratings issued by IIHS show how well each vehicle protects a dummy (representing a human body) in a controlled testing environment, and the driver fatality report shows real-world results, which reflect factors like how people drive cars, where they drive them, and what kind of other vehicles they share the road with.
He recommends that people shopping for a car consult both the IIHS crash test ratings, and the driver death report, to find the safest car for drivers.
The Kia Rio minicar topped the list for most driver deaths, at 170 per million annually.
Six vehicles had zero driver deaths per million annually — four luxury vehicles and a large SUV and a large pickup.
