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The Gap
The F-150 Was Involved in 20,066 Fatal Crashes. In 10,872 of Them, Someone Else Died.
10,872 — people killed in F-150 crashes who weren’t inside the F-150. That’s 54% of all fatal crashes involving the truck.
Last week we ran the lethality ratio—deaths per FARS crash for every vehicle—and the Ram 2500 came in at 0.205. Meaning: 79.5% of the time a Ram 2500 appears in a fatal crash, the person inside the Ram walks away. Somebody else doesn’t.
We framed that as survivability. It’s not. It’s a body count.
The aggressor metric
FARS records every crash that kills at least one person. Each vehicle in the dataset has two numbers: occupant deaths (the vehicle’s own people who died) and total crashes (the number of fatal crashes the vehicle appeared in). The gap between them—crashes minus occupant deaths—is the number of fatal crashes where the vehicle’s occupants survived but someone outside the vehicle did not.
Call it what it is: the external kill count.
The top 15 aggressor vehicles
| Vehicle | Type | Fatal Crashes | Own Dead | External Kills | External % |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ram 2500 | Pickup | 748 | 153 | 595 | 79.5% |
| Ford Transit | Van | 577 | 178 | 399 | 69.2% |
| Ram 1500 | Pickup | 2,095 | 714 | 1,381 | 65.9% |
| GMC Acadia | SUV | 575 | 197 | 378 | 65.7% |
| Ford F-250 | Pickup | 2,499 | 909 | 1,590 | 63.6% |
| Chevrolet Traverse | SUV | 675 | 265 | 410 | 60.7% |
| Lexus RX | SUV | 798 | 327 | 471 | 59.0% |
| Ford E-350 | Van | 1,892 | 776 | 1,116 | 59.0% |
| Toyota Tundra | Pickup | 2,947 | 1,223 | 1,724 | 58.5% |
| Honda Odyssey | Van | 2,028 | 864 | 1,164 | 57.4% |
| Dodge Durango | SUV | 828 | 356 | 472 | 57.0% |
| Dodge Ram | Pickup | 10,110 | 4,407 | 5,703 | 56.4% |
| Jeep Grand Cherokee | SUV | 2,637 | 1,161 | 1,476 | 56.0% |
| Honda Pilot | SUV | 1,135 | 514 | 621 | 54.7% |
| Ford F-150 | Pickup | 20,066 | 9,194 | 10,872 | 54.2% |
Every vehicle on this list is a pickup, an SUV, or a full-size van. Every single one weighs over 4,000 pounds.
The F-150 sits at the bottom of the percentage list but leads in raw volume: 10,872 people killed in F-150 crashes who were not riding in an F-150. More than the entire death toll of the Cobalt, Cavalier, and Neon combined.
The class-level split
| Vehicle Class | Fatal Crashes | Occupant Deaths | External Kills | External % |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pickups | 85,128 | 41,593 | 43,535 | 51.1% |
| Vans | 15,362 | 7,897 | 7,465 | 48.6% |
| SUVs | 88,568 | 46,442 | 42,126 | 47.6% |
| Sedans | 138,154 | 89,127 | 49,027 | 35.5% |
| Sports Cars | 8,990 | 6,134 | 2,856 | 31.8% |
Pickups cross the 50% line. More than half the people who die in pickup-involved fatal crashes are not inside the pickup. Sports car drivers, by contrast, overwhelmingly kill themselves—68% of the time, the sports car occupant is the fatality.
That 15.6-percentage-point gap between pickups and sedans isn’t driver behavior. FARS toxicology shows impairment rates vary by maybe 2–4 points across classes.[1] The difference is mass. A 5,500-pound F-150 hitting a 2,900-pound Civic transfers energy according to Newton, not NHTSA star ratings.
The arms race nobody admits is happening
IIHS has published this for years: when a heavier vehicle strikes a lighter one, the lighter vehicle’s occupants bear a disproportionate share of crash energy.[2] Every 1,000-pound weight advantage roughly doubles the lighter vehicle’s fatality risk in a two-vehicle crash. The physics is non-negotiable.
So Americans responded rationally. They bought bigger vehicles. Average new-vehicle curb weight climbed from 3,221 pounds in 1990 to 4,329 pounds in 2023, according to EPA data.[3] Trucks and SUVs went from 33% of new sales in 1990 to 78% in 2023. Every individual purchase made sense: the buyer got safer. The fleet got deadlier.
This is a collective action problem dressed up as consumer choice.
The 145,009
Across all 337 models in the FARS dataset: 336,202 fatal crashes produced 191,193 occupant deaths. The remaining 145,009 fatalities were people outside the vehicle—pedestrians, cyclists, occupants of other cars, motorcyclists. Forty-three percent of everyone who died in a fatal crash involving these vehicles was not inside the vehicle that FARS tagged.
Nobody tracks this metric at the model level. NHTSA publishes death rates. IIHS publishes star ratings and driver death rates. Consumer Reports publishes crash-test scores. All of these measure how well a vehicle protects its own occupants. None of them measure how efficiently a vehicle kills everyone else.
The Dodge Ram was involved in 10,110 fatal crashes over ten years. Its 5,703 external kills would make it the 15th-largest cause of accidental death in America if it were its own category, slotted between drowning and fire.[4]
But the Ram’s marketing materials will tell you it earned five stars.
Sources & References
- NHTSA, Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS), 2014–2023. All crash counts, occupant deaths, and impairment data derived from FARS bulk files. nhtsa.gov
- IIHS, “Vehicle Size and Weight” — research on mass disparities in two-vehicle crashes and fatality risk distribution. iihs.org
- U.S. EPA, Automotive Trends Report, 2023. Historical vehicle weight and market share data. epa.gov
- CDC, National Vital Statistics System — Leading Causes of Injury Death. Drowning and fire/burn death counts used for scale comparison. cdc.gov
- NHTS, National Household Travel Survey — annual vehicle miles traveled by model, used for fleet-size and VMT estimation. nhts.ornl.gov
“External kills” defined as FARS-reportable fatal crashes involving a vehicle where the vehicle’s own occupants were not among the fatalities. This proxy counts crashes, not individual non-occupant deaths per crash. Actual non-occupant fatalities may differ. Only vehicles with 500+ FARS crashes are ranked. All data from NHTSA FARS public files, 2014–2023. See methodology for caveats.