Tuesday, March 15, 2005

Chevy Blazer model had highest death rate, study finds

Mercedes E class had lowest rate in insurance industry report

By Ken Thomas / Associated Press

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WASHINGTON -- The two-door, two-wheel-drive Chevrolet Blazer had the highest rate of driver death from 2000 through 2003, according a study released Tuesday by the insurance industry.

Models of the Blazer built from 1999 through 2002 had 308 driver deaths per million registered vehicles of that make and model on the road annually during the four-year span, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety study found. The sport utility vehicle also had the highest rollover death rate at 251 deaths.

The two-door Mitsubishi Mirage had the second-highest rate with 209 driver deaths followed by the Pontiac Firebird, which registered 205 deaths.

The report found that heavier vehicles in categories such as cars, SUVs and pickups generally had lower death rates. Among SUVs, the death rate in the lightest vehicles was more than twice as high as in the heaviest SUVs.

"Pound for pound across the vehicle types, cars almost always have lower death rates than either pickups or SUVs. This generally is because the SUVs and pickups have much higher rates of death in single-vehicle rollover crashes," said Adrian Lund, the institute's chief operating officer.

Alan Adler, a General Motors Corp. spokesman, said the study failed to illustrate the role that human behavior or the pattern of the vehicle's use could have factored into the fatalities. GM produces the Chevy and Pontiac models.

"It is impossible in looking at these statistics to know what role driver behavior, such as drunk driving and driving without a safety belt, played in these deaths," Adler said. "We know from decades of work that whether a driver dies in a crash has more to do with behavior than with the vehicle."

Dottie Diemer, a Mitsubishi spokeswoman, said the Mirage Coupe is no longer in production. But prior to its production ending after the 2001 model year, she said it "met or exceeded all applicable federal safety standards relating to crash worthiness and occupant protection."

The institute said the general pattern of death rates have been consistent since it began computing the data in the late 1980s.

The average driver death rate in the latest study was 87 per million registered vehicle years. Lund noted a "pattern of improvement" showing that in the late 1980s the overall driver death rate was higher than 100.

The Mercedes E class had the lowest rate with 10 deaths, followed by the Toyota 4Runner, the Volkswagen Passat and the Lexus RX 300.

The study of 199 passenger vehicle models included rates of driver deaths in all crashes plus rates in multiple-vehicle, single-vehicle, and single-vehicle rollover crashes.

The rate represented the reported number of driver deaths divided by the model's number of registered years, according to data from the federal government's Fatality Analysis Reporting System and registration counts from The Polk Company, a Michigan-based provider of automotive information.

On the Net:
Insurance Institute for Highway Safety: http://www.iihs.org