The Buick Century Hasn’t Been Built Since 2005. It Still Kills 85 People a Year.

The last Buick Century rolled off General Motors’ Oshawa, Ontario assembly line sometime in 2005. Nobody threw it a party. It was a beige sedan that existed primarily to fill a slot on the Buick price ladder between the Regal and the LeSabre, purchased almost exclusively by people who had owned a previous Buick Century. Not the nameplate but the act itself went out with the quiet dignity of a dentist’s waiting room magazine.

That was twenty years ago. In the decade from 2014 through 2023, 849 people died in crashes involving Buick Centuries.^[1] Eighty-five per year, in a car that hasn’t been manufactured since the year YouTube launched.

At 2.41 per 100 million vehicle miles traveled, the Century’s death rate sits above the death-weighted sedan average of 2.15.^[1] So the Century isn’t just still killing. It’s killing at an above-average clip. A 2002 Buick Century driven in 2020 was more dangerous per mile than the median sedan on the road. This is a car that predates electronic stability control, side curtain airbags in most trims, and tire pressure monitoring. It has the structural rigidity of a conversation about the weather.

Model-year breakdowns tell you everything about who is dying. Peak fatalities come from model year 2003 (147 deaths), followed by 2002 (120) and 2001 (97). Every single Century death in the dataset involves a vehicle built before 2006.^[1] The death-weighted average model year is roughly 2001, meaning the typical Century in a fatal crash during this window was around seventeen years old.

Crash lethality compounds the problem. Of the 1,106 FARS fatal crashes involving a Buick Century, 849 killed the Century occupant. That is a 76.8% occupant death rate per crash. In more than three out of four fatal crashes, the person inside the Century is the one who does not survive.^[1] Compare this to a modern midsize SUV like the Hyundai Tucson (0.454, or 45.4%) or the Ram 1500 pickup (0.341). When a Century gets into a fatal crash, it is almost always the Century that loses.

You could construct a narrative about impairment, but the numbers don’t cooperate. Century drivers test positive for alcohol or drugs in 21.8% of FARS cases. Sedans average 20.4%.^[1] That is a statistically insignificant spread. Century drivers are not meaningfully more impaired than the broader sedan population. They are dying sober, at the wheel of the most forgettable car ever mass-produced, seventeen years after its warranty expired.

GM built the Century on its W-body platform, a mid-1990s architecture that also underpinned the Chevrolet Impala, Pontiac Grand Prix, and Buick Regal. Together, the W-body extended family has amassed approximately 5,900 FARS deaths since 2014.^[1] Its stablemate Impala alone accounts for 3,774 of those at a staggering rate of 5.0 per 100 million VMT. These are the most prolific dead platforms in America. They have no new safety features, no over-the-air updates, no recall priority because there is nothing to improve. They will simply age off the road one fatality at a time.

Modern Buick has moved on. The Encore, which now fills roughly the market slot the Century once occupied, has a death rate of 0.52 — more than four and a half times safer per mile than the Century.^[1] That gap is real, it is enormous, and it is entirely a function of twenty years of crashworthiness engineering that the Century never received.

At current fleet attrition rates and the Century’s roughly 306,000 remaining registered vehicles, this car will continue appearing in the FARS database for years. Probably a decade. Possibly longer in states with no vehicle inspection programs, where a 2002 Century with a Check Engine light and prayers holding the ball joints together will pass muster indefinitely. The last Century-related death will likely occur sometime in the mid-2030s. That will be thirty years after the final one was built.

A car that nobody remembers. That nobody particularly liked. That won zero awards and earned zero enthusiast affection. Eight hundred and forty-nine dead, and counting.

Vin Wreckage recommends exactly one action: if you or someone you know drives a Buick Century, check the vehicle’s age. If it is from model years 1997 through 2005, its structural crashworthiness was designed to standards that predate the 2007 ESC mandate, the 2012 roof-strength standard, and the 2018 backup camera requirement.^[2] You are driving a vehicle that was engineered for an era when 42,000 annual traffic deaths was considered acceptable. That number is now 39,000, and the cars keeping it that high are the ones nobody talks about.

Source: NHTSA FARS 2014–2023. Death rates use estimated fleet size and VMT; low-volume models carry higher uncertainty. The 76.8% crash lethality measures Century occupant deaths per FARS crash involving a Century, not per all crashes. See methodology for caveats.