LendingTree Ranked America’s Most Aggressive Vehicles. They Forgot to Divide.

According to the demographic reports on aggressive driving fatalities, LendingTree just published a ranking that tells you which vehicles are popular.^[1] The insurance comparison site used 2024 FARS data to crown the Chevrolet Silverado America’s most aggressive vehicle: 153 fatal crashes involving careless or aggressive driving, 3.2% of the national total. Ford’s F-150 took second at 146 crashes, and a dozen outlets ran both rankings as fact. Nobody asked the obvious question: 3.2% of aggressive crashes, but what percentage of all crashes?

We ran their vehicle list against a decade of FARS data covering 336,202 fatal crashes across 337 models.^[2] Divide each vehicle’s aggressive-driving crash share by its all-crash share, and a ratio below 1.0 means underrepresented in aggressive driving; above 1.0 means overrepresented.

Every vehicle in LendingTree’s top five lands well below 1.0. They topped the raw count because America bought 760,000 F-150s and 520,000 Silverados last year, not because their drivers run hotter than the national baseline.

Buried at rank eleven, the Dodge Charger posted just 50 crashes, with an aggressive-driving share of 1.05% against only 0.46% of all fatal crashes, producing a ratio of 2.28×. For every crash the Charger’s fleet size would predict, it appears in aggressive-driving statistics 2.3 times. No other vehicle in the top 25 clears 1.6. Ford’s Mustang, by contrast, carries 2,739 FARS deaths and a fatality rate of 6.02 per 100M VMT but registers just 0.75 on the aggression ratio because Mustang crashes skew toward single-vehicle speed events. Mustang drivers crash alone; Charger drivers crash into other people.

Dodge marketed the Charger as a 707-horsepower weapon with “Hellcat” in the trim name, sold it to police departments as a pursuit vehicle, and should not have been surprised when its owners drove aggressively. Self-selection is real, but that is exactly the signal fleet-size normalization exists to surface, and LendingTree drowned it in volume noise because they never performed the division.

Caveats: our crash shares span 2014 through 2023 while LendingTree used 2024 alone. The Charger was discontinued in 2023, so its 2024 crashes come entirely from the used market. FARS aggressive-driving coding remains wildly inconsistent across states, with Utah reporting zero and Arkansas reporting 258 in the same year, a data quality problem we documented previously that undermines every vehicle-level conclusion drawn from these fields.^[3] LendingTree also bundled five separate FARS driver-factor codes into a single “aggressive driving” category, making it broader than the colloquial meaning.

If you’re shopping for a used Charger, know that its peer group on the road includes a measurably higher proportion of aggressive drivers than the truck next to it at the stoplight, and price your coverage accordingly. And if somebody texts you a link calling the Silverado America’s road-rage truck, show them what happens when you divide.