The Chevy S-10 Hasn't Been Sold in 22 Years. It Still Kills 143 People Annually.

Chevrolet stopped making the S-10 in 2004. Replaced it with the Colorado, thanked the assembly line, moved on. Twenty-two years later, the S-10 still kills 143 people per year in fatal crashes tracked by NHTSA's Fatality Analysis Reporting System.^[1] Its fatality rate: 4.83 deaths per 100 million vehicle miles traveled. Its replacement manages 0.28. Seventeen to one.

There are approximately 219,000 S-10s still registered in the United States. They generated 1,427 fatalities and 1,890 fatal crashes between 2014 and 2023. Run those numbers and the per-crash lethality lands at 75.5%. Three out of four S-10 crashes that make it into the FARS database produce a death. Colorado, with four times the fleet, manages 48.9%. Toyota's Tacoma, the segment benchmark, sits at 52.3%.^[1]

An easy explanation would be drunk driving. It is also wrong. S-10 drivers show an impairment rate of 20.5%: 15.4% alcohol-positive, 8.6% drug-positive. Colorado drivers: 19.0%. Statistically indistinguishable. Same demographic buying cheap compact pickups, same proportion showing up to fatal crashes with substances in their blood. What differs is what happens in the first 150 milliseconds after impact.

No electronic stability control. No side-curtain airbags. No advanced crumple zone engineering. Every S-10 predates FMVSS 126, the 2007 ESC mandate that required stability control on all light vehicles by September 2011.^[2] It predates the IIHS side-impact evaluations that pushed manufacturers toward standard side airbags. Its body-on-frame construction, narrow track width, and high center of gravity when loaded created a rollover-prone platform that no safety technology existed to compensate for when the last one rolled off the line.

Compare across the compact pickup graveyard: the Ford Ranger (also discontinued, also pre-ESC in its deadliest vintages) runs at 2.91 per 100M VMT with a 69.0% per-crash lethality. GMC's Sonoma, the S-10's platform twin, hits 2.13 with a 79.6% kill rate on an even smaller sample. Every compact pickup from the pre-safety-mandate era is bad. Worst of all: the S-10.^[1]

Model year 2000 S-10s account for 178 of the 1,427 deaths. These are trucks that were 14 to 23 years old during the FARS window. Cheap enough for cash buyers. Old enough to have degraded safety systems (if they had any). Young enough to still run. Deadliest vintage of the deadliest compact pickup, owned disproportionately by people who cannot afford anything safer.

NHTSA does not track what happens to vehicle platforms after they stop being sold. There is no recall mechanism for "your truck was designed before we understood rollover dynamics." There is no federal program to retire pre-ESC vehicles the way Cash for Clunkers briefly attempted in 2009. The S-10 just sits on the road, accumulating bodies at a rate that would trigger an investigation if it were a new vehicle, invisible because it left the showroom before anyone thought to count.

If you are shopping for a compact pickup: anything built after 2012 with ESC and side airbags is categorically safer. A Tacoma runs at 0.80, a Colorado at 0.28. If you own an S-10, know that your truck kills at 4.4 times the pickup class average, and the engineering gap is not something a careful driver can overcome. Check your VIN at nhtsa.gov/recalls for outstanding recalls, and price out the cost of a used 2015-plus Colorado. At 0.28 vs. 4.83, the math is not subtle.