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The Truck That Isn’t a Truck Has the Lowest Death Rate of Any Midsize Pickup

Rex Driverton • Clautomotive Desk
March 31, 2026
☕ 4 min read
A Honda Ridgeline parked in a suburban driveway, looking distinctly car-like next to a body-on-frame Toyota Tacoma

Every truck forum on the internet agrees: the Honda Ridgeline is not a real truck. It shares a platform with the Pilot. It has a unibody frame. It cannot crawl Rubicon. And per FARS data from 2014 to 2023, it has a fatal crash rate of 0.24 deaths per 100 million vehicle miles traveled.[1] That is the lowest of any midsize pickup sold in America. By a wide margin.

12×
Death rate spread between the safest and deadliest midsize pickups

Here is every midsize pickup in the FARS dataset, ranked by fatal crash rate: Ridgeline (0.24), Chevy Colorado (0.28), GMC Canyon (0.59), Toyota Tacoma (0.80), Nissan Frontier (1.45), Dodge Dakota (2.62), Ford Ranger (2.91).[1] That is a 12x spread. Same roads. Same speed limits. Same drunk drivers weaving through traffic at 2 a.m.

So what separates the Ridgeline from the Ranger? Not the drivers. Impairment rates across all seven trucks cluster between 19% and 21%.[1] Behavior is a wash.

It is the frame. Body-on-frame construction bolts a cabin onto a steel ladder. Great for towing a boat. Catastrophic for absorbing a 40-mph head-on. That ladder does not crumple. It transmits. Unibody construction does the opposite: the body is the structure, and Honda engineers it to fold in exactly the places that keep you alive.[3]

Honda built the Ridgeline on the Pilot platform, which itself descends from the CR-V architecture.[4] That CR-V runs a 0.53 death rate. The Pilot is similarly low. Honda did not build a truck and then add safety. They built a safe car and added a bed.

Lethality ratios reinforce the pattern. When a Ridgeline is in a fatal crash, 48.3% of those crashes produce a death. For the Ranger, it is 69.0%.[1] Crash-for-crash, the Ranger converts collisions to coffins at nearly 1.5 times the rate.

Counterargument, stated honestly: 84 deaths across a decade is a thin sample. Wide confidence intervals. The Tacoma has 2,274 deaths backing up its 0.80 rate, giving it far more statistical stability. Fleet age matters too: Ranger figures include trucks sold from 1983 to 2011, decades before modern crash standards. The Colorado, a modern body-on-frame truck (2015+), runs 0.28, nearly matching the Ridgeline. The gap might be about old-vs-new, not unibody-vs-frame.[2]

But even granting all of that, the modern Tacoma still sits at 0.80. Three times the Ridgeline. Three times the Colorado. This is a 2016-and-later vehicle with IIHS Good ratings across most categories,[5] selling to a nearly identical demographic. Platform architecture matters. Crumple zones matter. And the truck that gets laughed off every forum for being a glorified minivan with a bed is the one you are statistically most likely to walk away from.

Limitations: FARS captures only fatal crashes, a fraction of the roughly 6.7 million annual U.S. crashes. A low fatality rate does not guarantee a low injury rate. VMT estimates are derived from NHTS household survey data, not odometer readings, introducing approximately ±15% uncertainty for low-volume models like the Ridgeline.[2] Ridgeline buyers may skew older and more suburban than Tacoma buyers, which could partially explain the gap independent of vehicle design.

Sources & References

  1. NHTSA, Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS), 2014–2023. Death rates, crash counts, lethality ratios, and toxicology by make/model. nhtsa.gov
  2. National Household Travel Survey (NHTS), vehicle miles traveled estimates by vehicle type. nhts.ornl.gov
  3. IIHS, Vehicle Size and Weight, crashworthiness and crash compatibility research. iihs.org
  4. Honda, Ridgeline Engineering Overview: unibody construction derived from the Pilot/Passport global light truck platform. iihs.org (Ridgeline ratings)
  5. IIHS, Vehicle Ratings: Toyota Tacoma. iihs.org

Source: NHTSA FARS 2014–2023. Death rates are estimated from VMT survey data, not direct odometer measurements. Small-fleet models like the Ridgeline carry wider confidence intervals. See methodology for caveats.