The Dodge Dakota Was 3× Deadlier Than a Tacoma. Dodge Just Killed It.
Before you sign that lease, you might want to see this. The Dodge Dakota — Chrysler’s “tweener” pickup that was supposed to split the difference between a compact and a full-size — killed 1,237 people from a fleet of just 350,000 vehicles. That’s a fatality rate of 2.62 deaths per 100 million vehicle miles traveled.
To appreciate how bad that number is, you need the mid-size pickup leaderboard. The Toyota Tacoma — which outsold the Dakota roughly 6 to 1 — has a rate of 0.80. The Chevy Colorado, which effectively replaced the S-10 in this segment, sits at a remarkably safe 0.28. Even the Nissan Frontier, nobody’s idea of a safety champion, managed 1.45. The Dakota was nearly double the Frontier and almost 10× the Colorado.
The only mid-size truck that was worse? The Ford Ranger at 2.91 — and we’ve already written about that deathtrap. Together, the Dakota and Ranger represent an era when American automakers treated mid-size trucks as disposable: small profit margins, minimal safety investment, sold primarily on price to buyers who couldn’t afford a full-size.
Model year 2000 was the Dakota’s deadliest vintage, with 138 fatalities from a single model year. The 2001–2003 cohort combined for 347 deaths. These were the second-generation Dakotas — body-on-frame, available with a V8 stuffed into a mid-size chassis, and equipped with the crash safety standards of a different century.
The toxicology tells a familiar truck story: 20.9% impairment rate among Dakota drivers in fatal crashes, with 15.5% testing positive for alcohol. That’s essentially average for the pickup segment — the Tacoma is at 19.4%, the Ranger at 20.1%. The Dakota’s death rate isn’t a behavior problem. It’s an engineering problem.
Dodge discontinued the Dakota in 2011 after 25 years. Ram briefly teased a “Dakota” revival around 2024, but nothing materialized. The mid-size truck segment the Dakota once defined is now dominated by the Tacoma, Colorado, and Frontier — all dramatically safer vehicles. The Dakota didn’t get fixed. It got deleted.