The Toyota Highlander Has 2.1 Million on the Road and a Fatality Rate 3.7 Times Lower Than the Ford Explorer. Nobody Cares.

Two point one million Toyota Highlanders sit in American driveways right now. That fleet is larger than the Ford Explorer's. And over the last decade of FARS data, the Highlander's fatality rate is 0.42 deaths per 100 million vehicle miles traveled, compared to the Explorer's 1.54. Same segment, same buyer profile, and one is 3.7 times more likely to kill you per mile.

Run the math backwards and it gets ugly. If the Highlander's 2.1 million vehicles had the Explorer's fatality rate, FARS would record roughly 4,040 deaths instead of 1,106. That gap is approximately 2,900 people — not a rounding error, not a methodological quibble, just people who are breathing because somebody bought the beige one at the Toyota dealer instead of walking across the lot to Ford.

The competitive set makes this worse, not better. Among midsize three-row SUVs with enough fleet to matter statistically, the full ranking looks like this: Traverse at 0.20, Pilot at 0.29, Sorento at 0.29, Santa Fe at 0.39, Highlander at 0.42, Grand Cherokee at 0.51, Pathfinder at 0.93, Explorer at 1.54.^[1] Bottom to top, that is a 7.7-fold spread. You are shopping a segment where the safest and most dangerous options differ by nearly an order of magnitude, and no salesperson on earth is going to volunteer that number.

Somebody will argue demographics, and fair enough: Highlander drivers are 16.4% impaired in FARS fatal crashes, the lowest of any major SUV, compared to the Explorer at 19.5% and the Grand Cherokee at 20.8%.^[2] Highlander buyers skew toward suburban two-income households who think a third row is non-negotiable and a DUI is unthinkable, and that selection bias genuinely helps. But three percentage points of impairment difference cannot explain a 3.7-fold rate gap — strip out every impaired driver from both vehicles and the Highlander still dominates, because its crash lethality ratio (the share of its fatal crashes that kill its own occupant) is 0.454, versus the Explorer's 0.573.^[1] When a Highlander is in a fatal crash, the Highlander occupant is less likely to be the one who dies, and that is engineering, not demographics.

Maybe the most damning detail is the model-year curve. Most vehicles have a "bad vintage" where deaths spike, usually a generation change where the platform was weakest or a design defect went unnoticed until the lawsuits hit. Not the Highlander. Its model-year death counts from 2004 through 2019 range from 36 to 75, with no spike, no cliff, no recall-shaped crater.^[3] It is the flattest mortality curve in the dataset for any vehicle with more than a thousand FARS deaths. Every generation Toyota shipped was approximately equally not-lethal. That consistency across four platform generations and sixteen model years is harder to fake than a single good crash test score.

None of this is sexy. Toyota will not run an ad saying "our SUV kills 3.7 times fewer people than the Explorer." Consumer Reports ranks the Highlander highly but buries the fatality data because their methodology weights owner satisfaction and predicted reliability, not FARS body counts.^[4] And the IIHS gives the Explorer and the Highlander the same Top Safety Pick+ badge, because the test protocol measures what happens when you hit a barrier at 40 mph, not what happens across 26 billion miles of actual driving.^[5]

If you are buying a three-row SUV this summer, the FARS data says Traverse, Pilot, and Highlander are your best bets. The Explorer is at the bottom of the segment by a margin that should be disqualifying but somehow is not. Check your VIN at nhtsa.gov/recalls regardless of what you drive.