The Chrysler 300 Kills 2.5× More People Than the Dodge Charger. They’re the Same Car.
Here’s a fun fact that will ruin your morning commute. The Chrysler 300 — the car your uncle bought because it “looked like a Bentley” — kills at 1.87 deaths per 100 million vehicle miles traveled. The Dodge Charger, its mechanical twin with the muscle-car reputation and the Hellcat trim that Insurance Institute actuaries lose sleep over? 0.75.
Same LX platform. Same Brampton, Ontario assembly plant. Same 3.6-liter Pentastar V6 or 5.7-liter HEMI V8. Same rear-wheel-drive architecture. Chrysler draped it in chrome and marketed it to middle managers. Dodge painted it black and sold it to people who wanted to embarrass Mustangs at stoplights. The engineering is identical. The death toll is not.
The 300 has accumulated 751 fatalities from a fleet of 350,000 vehicles. The Charger: 715 deaths from a fleet of 831,250 — more than double the cars on the road, producing fewer total deaths. The Charger’s model year 2018 was its worst at 69 deaths. The 300’s model year 2015 hit 114 fatalities from a far smaller fleet.
The impairment data doesn’t explain it either. The 300’s alcohol rate is 15.6%, with 20.5% testing positive for any substance. That’s actually below the national average of roughly 20%. These aren’t drunk drivers wrapping 300s around telephone poles. These are sober drivers dying in a car that should perform identically to its safer sibling.
So what accounts for a 2.5× gap between mechanically identical cars? Demographics. The 300’s buyer profile skews older, drawn by the Bentley-lite styling and “luxury” positioning at Chrysler’s price point. The Charger attracts younger, more performance-oriented drivers — but those drivers are also more likely to have modern safety assists on higher trims, and critically, more likely to be driving recent model years with better crash structures. The 300’s fleet is weighted toward 2005–2015 cars that are still on the road in 2023, aging into the used-car market without the safety updates that later Chargers received.
Chrysler killed the 300 nameplate in 2023 when it shuttered the Brampton plant. The Charger got reborn as an EV. The “respectable” choice died first. The data suggests it was always the more dangerous one.