Kia Rio drivers die at 170 per million, the IIHS’s highest rate

The Kia Rio had the highest driver death rate of any 2023 model year vehicle in the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety’s latest analysis: 170 deaths per million registered vehicle years, against an average of 37 across all vehicles. The IIHS published the figures on July 30, 2026.

The Rio is a subcompact that Kia stopped selling in the United States after the 2023 model year, so the ranking describes cars already on the road rather than anything on a dealer lot today.

What a death rate per million registered vehicle years counts

The IIHS release ranks 2023 model year vehicles and comparable earlier models by driver deaths per million registered vehicle years, using fatal crashes from 2021 through 2024. A registered vehicle year is one vehicle on the road for one year, so a rate of 170 means roughly 170 drivers died for every million such years, or about one in every 5,900 Rios registered for a year. The average across all vehicles was 37.

The institute adjusts for driver age and gender but not for the miles a vehicle is driven or how fast, according to CarPro’s summary of the study. KBB reports that the analysis covers vehicles with at least 100,000 registered vehicle years of exposure over the period. That threshold keeps low-volume models, where a handful of crashes could swing a rate wildly, out of the table, which means the Rio’s 170 comes from a fleet large enough to have produced a stable number rather than a statistical fluke. The trade-off is that the ranking says little about rare cars and a great deal about popular ones.

The Rio, the Versa and the muscle cars

The Rio’s 170 leads a list dominated by small cars and performance models. Behind it come the Nissan Versa at 164, the Chrysler 300 2WD at 132 and the Dodge Charger HEMI 2WD at 127, per the IIHS release, and CarPro adds the Chevrolet Camaro at 88. A Yahoo Autos account of the study lists the Kia Forte at 120 and the Nissan Altima at 105, so Kia has two entries among the higher rates. More than half of the vehicles with the highest rates are small cars, sports cars or muscle cars.

The Rio is a good example of what a rate can and cannot say. The Motor1 report on its discontinuation cites Kia’s statement to Automotive News that customer preferences had shifted toward crossovers and SUVs, and Kia kept the larger Forte in its lineup. The IIHS data adjust for driver age and gender but not for how or how far a car is driven, so a low-priced subcompact can score badly for reasons that the crash statistics do not isolate.

Harkey on size, power and driving behavior

IIHS President David Harkey said in the institute’s release: “Size and power matter, as do vehicle crashworthiness and effective crash avoidance systems.” Per the Yahoo Autos account, the institute’s own caveat is that the numbers reflect far more than crashworthiness, and sports cars and muscle cars are especially dangerous because of how they are driven. As Carrier Management quotes him, “Even the safest small cars don’t fare well in crashes with large pickups and heavy SUVs,” and for performance models “powerful engines and marketing that attracts aggressive drivers is the issue.”

Small vehicles carry a structural disadvantage. Harkey said occupants of smaller vehicles are at a disadvantage when they collide with larger pickups and SUVs, per CarPro’s account of the release.

The other end of the table is the mirror image. Six models recorded zero driver deaths in the study, according to the IIHS release: the Audi Q7 4WD, BMW X7 4WD, Chevrolet Tahoe 4WD, Mercedes-Benz GLB-Class 4WD, Mercedes-Benz GLE-Class 2WD and Toyota Tundra CrewMax 4WD. Eighteen of the 20 lowest-rate models are SUVs, mostly luxury ones.

A new metric for the drivers of other cars

The release also added an other-driver death rate, which counts people killed in other vehicles in crashes involving the model. The Carscoops report notes that the Ram 3500 crew cab long bed 4WD posted 204 deaths per million, the highest figure in the report and higher than the Rio’s 170 driver rate. The IIHS says heavy-duty pickups occupy ten of the top 20 places on that list.

The two rankings pull in opposite directions. The models that protect their own drivers best are large, and the largest vehicles impose the greatest risk on everyone else, which is the tradeoff the IIHS spells out. Where a model lands on either table depends partly on who buys it and how it is driven, and the institute’s data do not correct for miles, speed or driver experience. The 170-versus-zero gap between the Rio and the six zero-death models therefore contains both the cars themselves and the way they are used, and the IIHS release does not attempt to separate the two.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

More from Morning Overview