Your Pickup Is Safest at 70. It's Most Dangerous at 25.

A pedestrian struck by a median-height pickup at 25 mph has a 62% chance of serious injury, while a pedestrian struck by a median-height car at that same speed faces a 9% risk, and that is not a misprint or a modeling artifact. Same posted limit, same crosswalk, same kid walking home from school, and the vehicle on the other side of the equation changes the outcome by a factor of seven.^[1]

New research out of the University of Tennessee, using 15 years of state police crash records and vehicle identification data, found that pickups and large SUVs carry 50 to 80% higher fatal outcome odds for pedestrians compared with passenger cars in low-speed collisions.^[2] At higher speeds the gap narrows, not because trucks get safer but because cars catch up in lethality: at 55 mph both will kill you, while at 25 mph only one reliably will.

IIHS companion data from December 2024 quantifies why the mechanism is so brutal: the speed-height interaction is multiplicative, not additive, meaning every inch of hood height compounds the lethality at any given speed rather than adding a fixed penalty.^[1] Between 15 and 35 mph, serious injury risk for a pedestrian struck by a car climbs from 9% to 52%, while risk from a median pickup climbs from 11% to 91% across that same 20 mph range. Both start in roughly the same place at 15 mph but diverge catastrophically by 35, because a tall, blunt hood strikes an adult pedestrian at center mass and catches a child square in the head.

NHTSA's own crash records trace the macro trend behind these lab numbers. Pedestrian deaths rose 80% from their 2009 low to 7,342 in 2021, a toll the country had not seen since 1981.^[3] SUV-class vehicles drove the steepest increase: 81% more pedestrian fatality involvement from 2009 to 2016, versus 41% for passenger cars, a gap that widened as the average American passenger vehicle grew 8 inches taller, 10 inches longer, and 1,000 pounds heavier over the past three decades.^[4][5] Hood lines on some large pickups now sit at eye level for a typical adult standing in a crosswalk.

Electrification adds a wrinkle the industry would prefer to ignore, and the Tennessee researchers call it out directly. EV pickups carry 1,000 to 2,000 extra pounds of battery mass compared with their combustion equivalents, roll on near-silent drivetrains that eliminate the auditory warning a pedestrian relies on at low speed, and fundamentally shift how a front end absorbs energy at impact.^[2] An F-150 Lightning weighs 6,171 pounds; a Rivian R1T tops 7,100; a Cybertruck exceeds 6,600. As these heavier electrified trucks replace aging combustion fleets in residential neighborhoods, the researchers warn that low-speed pedestrian outcomes will worsen precisely because the collisions happen where posted limits are lowest and children are most present.

In September 2024, NHTSA proposed its first-ever pedestrian head-impact performance rule, which would use human-like head dummies simulating children and adults in hood-impact tests to set minimum performance thresholds for all vehicles weighing up to 10,000 pounds.^[6] By the agency's own estimate, the rule would save 67 lives per year against a pedestrian death toll exceeding 7,500. Most full-size pickup trucks and large SUVs weigh just under that 10,000-pound ceiling, meaning they would be covered but were not designed with these tests in mind.

Fair rebuttal: large vehicles protect their occupants brilliantly, and families buy them precisely because occupant fatality rates run lower than sedans in vehicle-to-vehicle crashes. But that calculation omits everyone outside the cabin entirely, and the Tennessee data shows that vehicle characteristics alone cannot explain the full threefold rise in pedestrian fatalities since 2009. Infrastructure shares blame: missing sidewalks, wide arterials built for throughput over safety, poor lighting at crossings. None of that, however, changes what happens when 6,500 pounds of steel and battery meet a 50-pound child at 25 miles per hour.

If you drive through a school zone or any neighborhood where children walk, consider that the posted speed limit was calibrated for a 3,000-pound sedan, and the American fleet outgrew that assumption more than a decade ago. Speed limits did not adjust downward, hoods did not come down, and the federal rule mandating pedestrian head-impact testing has still not been finalized. For anyone shopping for a vehicle who lives on a street where people walk, the IIHS data leaves no ambiguity: every inch of hood height erodes the protection that 25 mph was engineered to provide.