IIHS Just Tested Commercial Vehicles for the First Time. The Express Has Been Killing Drivers Without Force Limiters for 29 Years.

For decades, IIHS crash-tested sedans, SUVs, minivans, pickups. It published ratings, handed out awards, and shamed automakers into adding side airbags and better headlights until the entire passenger vehicle market reshaped itself around the institute's increasingly strict criteria. And for that entire span of time, nobody at the institute looked at the vehicles carrying your Amazon packages, your FedEx envelopes, your lumber, your plumber's tools. Commercial vans and heavy-duty pickups operated in a parallel universe where basic occupant protection was optional, while 6,535 people died in crashes involving those vehicles in 2023 alone, accounting for 16% of every roadway death in America.^[1]

On June 9, IIHS released its first-ever evaluations of commercial vehicles: nine models, six cargo vans and three Class 3 pickups, assessed against a checklist that would embarrass a 2005 Corolla. Standard front airbag, standard side airbag, seat belt pretensioners, force limiters, and an effective seat belt reminder, all features that have been baseline in your Honda Civic for twenty years. IIHS was not asking whether these commercial vehicles performed well in a 40-mph offset crash. It was asking whether they had airbags at all. Four passed; five did not.^[1]

Silverado 3500HD and F350 SuperCrew checked every box, as did two cargo vans: BrightDrop 400 and Ram ProMaster 2500. On the failure side, Ford Transit T250, Mercedes Sprinter 2500, Rivian Delivery 500, and Ram 3500 all lacked effective seat belt reminders. But the most damning result belonged to the Chevrolet Express 2500, which failed on two counts: no effective seat belt reminder, and no standard force limiters.^[1]

A force limiter is a mechanism in the seat belt retractor that, a fraction of a second after the pretensioner cinches the belt tight, allows a controlled amount of webbing to extend back out, redistributing chest loading during a crash so that the belt saving your life doesn't simultaneously crack your sternum. It costs a few dollars per retractor assembly, it has been standard equipment in most passenger vehicles since the early 2000s, and the Chevrolet Express has been in continuous production since 1996 without it.^[2]

FARS data for 2014 through 2023 records 475 fatalities involving the Chevrolet Express across 975 fatal crashes. Here is what makes that number worse: the impairment rate among Express drivers was 19%, well below the passenger vehicle average that hovers around 35% to 40% for many sedans and pickups in the same dataset. Plumbers, electricians, delivery workers, all belting up every morning in a vehicle that has been missing a fundamental occupant protection technology for its entire 29-year production run.^[3]

Nobody caught this because nobody required it and nobody checked. Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards mandating airbags and advanced restraint systems in passenger vehicles do not uniformly apply to commercial vehicles above certain weight thresholds. NHTSA's own seat belt reminder standard requires the audible signal to last only 4 to 8 seconds; IIHS tested for 90 seconds of persistent tone because its research shows persistent reminders increase belt use by 30% among part-time users who buckle inconsistently during frequent delivery stops. Stricter federal rules are "slated for 2028" for passenger vehicles and some commercial counterparts, which means two more years of the Express shipping without force limiters while federal regulators work through comment periods and industry pushback.^[1]

Consider the Rivian Delivery 500 alongside the Express, because it demolishes the "legacy platform" excuse. Rivian's van did not exist five years ago. Purpose-built for Amazon's last-mile delivery fleet, designed from a clean sheet, manufactured in a factory that opened in 2021, and equipped with every safety feature IIHS checked except the seat belt reminder. Not because of outdated engineering, not because of a platform that predates the technology, but because a brand-new vehicle built in 2025 simply did not include a 90-second persistent belt tone when the federal minimum of 4 to 8 seconds was apparently good enough for both the engineers and the regulators.

Front airbags reduce driver fatalities in frontal crashes by 29%, according to IIHS research; side airbags cut the risk of driver death in a side impact by 25% to 52%, depending on the crash configuration and airbag type. Airbags are the difference between a driver walking away from a T-bone and a driver being carried out of one, and they have been non-negotiable in passenger cars for a full generation while commercial vehicles operated in a regulatory shadow that allowed the Ford E-350 to accumulate 776 fatalities in FARS at a rate of 2.51 per 100 million VMT, one of the worst death records of any vehicle configuration in America.^[1][3]

Strongest counterargument

Commercial vehicles serve different missions, and many of them spend more time at low speeds on surface streets than passenger cars do, which genuinely reduces their exposure to the high-energy collisions that kill most efficiently. Their drivers sometimes receive professional training with company safety protocols that go beyond what any consumer driver follows. A reasonable case exists that the regulatory gap reflects a rational allocation of rule-making resources toward vehicle classes that accumulate the most highway VMT and kill the most occupants per vehicle-mile. And FARS involvement statistics count any crash where the commercial vehicle was present, not exclusively crashes where the vehicle's safety equipment was the proximate cause of death.

But when four out of five fatal-crash Express drivers are sober and their vehicle doesn't have force limiters, the use case is not the problem.

Limitations

FARS data cannot isolate how many Express fatalities would have been specifically prevented by force limiters, because the 475 deaths span all crash types and injury mechanisms, including collisions where no seat belt technology could have changed the outcome. IIHS's commercial vehicle evaluation did not crash-test any of these vehicles; it checked standard equipment only, so a vehicle passing every checklist item might still perform poorly in an actual impact test. Consider the evaluation a floor, not a ceiling.

What to do

If you manage a commercial fleet, pull up the IIHS results at iihs.org and verify what your vans actually have. If you are still buying Express vans, know that the 2025 model does not have force limiters, while both BrightDrop 400 and ProMaster 2500 pass every IIHS category. If you run a Ram 3500 fleet, your drivers lack an effective belt reminder; consider an aftermarket persistent-tone system. Your drivers already know how to drive, so give them equipment that knows how to protect them.