Look at the ten vehicles with the worst driver death rates in the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety’s newest report, and something jumps out that never made it into the press release: seven of them are no longer for sale. Not recalled. Not redesigned. Discontinued, replaced on the showroom floor, gone before the data even had a chance to catch up.
That’s not a coincidence dressed up as a headline. It’s the real story sitting underneath a study everyone read as a simple ranking of dangerous cars. IIHS spent four years counting bodies. The market, moving on an entirely different timeline and for entirely different reasons, had already handed down its own verdict.
This isn’t really a story about which cars are the most dangerous in America. It’s a story about how the industry solved a safety problem it was never trying to solve, and left the buyers who most need a cheap car with fewer good options than they had five years ago.
The Graveyard List
IIHS’s latest driver death rate study tracks fatalities from 2021 through 2024 tied to 2023-model vehicles, using a metric called deaths per million registered vehicle years. Auto Wire has already covered the six vehicles that posted zero deaths and the insurance-industry history behind the study itself. This is about the other end of the list: the ten worst-scoring models, and what happened to them since.
Start at the top. The Kia Rio posted the worst driver death rate of any 2023-model vehicle, 170 deaths per million registered vehicle years, and Kia ended U.S. Rio production before the 2024 model year arrived. Second is the Nissan Versa at 164; Nissan built its last one in December 2025, ending the run of the last new car in America priced under $20,000. Third is the two-wheel-drive Chrysler 300 at 132, retired in December 2023. Fourth and fifth are the Dodge Charger HEMI and Dodge Challenger, at 127 and 125, both built for the last time that same month as part of Stellantis’s self-described “Last Call” send-off for the old Hemi V8. Sixth is the Kia Forte at 120, discontinued after the 2024 model year and replaced by the K4. Seventh is the Chevrolet Malibu at 116, gone from Chevrolet’s lineup since November 2024. Eighth is the Hyundai Venue at 113, the only nameplate in the top eight still, unambiguously, for sale. Ninth and tenth sit almost tied at 105: the Nissan Altima, reported dead for 2027 by multiple outlets before Nissan pushed back, and the Nissan Maxima, which Nissan already ended in 2023 after 42 years on the market.
Seven of the ten worst-scoring vehicles in the country, by IIHS’s own numbers, are no longer built. An eighth is fighting for its life. Only the Venue is fully, currently, without caveat, a car you can walk into a dealership and order new.
Nobody Killed These Cars For Being Dangerous
None of these cars died because of a death rate. Every one of them sat in showrooms years before IIHS finalized this report, and most were killed for the same reason cheap cars keep disappearing everywhere: they don’t make money. Auto Wire has tracked that math on its own, from why the sub-$25,000 new car nearly vanished to how the Mustang became the last muscle car standing almost by default. The Rio, Versa, Forte, and Malibu lost to profit margins that favor crossovers. The 300, Charger, and Challenger lost to an aging platform and Stellantis’s push into electrification, not to a crash test.
That distinction matters, because nobody actually fixed anything. IIHS President David Harkey has said occupants of small cars are simply “at a disadvantage” the moment they meet something heavier, and physics doesn’t care whether the small car in question is still in production. IIHS was blunter about the muscle cars: the risk comes from engine power combined with how the vehicles get driven. Retire the Challenger and that driver doesn’t retire with it. He buys a Mustang, or a six-cylinder Charger, or something else entirely, and brings the same right foot along.
Where the Risk Goes Next
Two things happen when the cheapest cars in America disappear instead of getting redesigned.
The first is that whatever’s left inherits the title by default. With the Rio and Versa gone, the Hyundai Venue is now the least expensive new vehicle sold in the United States, starting around $20,550. It’s also a small SUV posting 113 driver deaths per million registered vehicle years, nearly three times the 38-death average IIHS calculated across small SUVs as a class. Being the cheapest new car in America right now isn’t an engineering achievement. It’s what’s left standing when everything below it stopped shipping.
The second is that the buyer who needed a cheap sedan hasn’t gone anywhere. Discontinuing a car doesn’t discontinue the shopper. That buyer moves into the used market, most likely into an older Rio, Versa, or Malibu, the exact vehicles this report just finished measuring, built before automatic emergency braking became mandatory equipment. NHTSA’s final rule requiring AEB on every new light vehicle doesn’t take full effect until September 2029, and it only reaches cars built after that date. A ten-year-old Versa bought this fall qualifies for none of it.
What to Remember
IIHS’s report reads like a scorecard for engineers. It’s really a scorecard for accountants. The cars that scored worst weren’t re-engineered into something safer; they were discontinued into something more profitable, and the safety story is a side effect nobody put in an earnings call. The affordable end of the new car market isn’t getting safer. It’s just getting smaller, one dead nameplate at a time, and the driver who used to buy a Rio is the one left holding whatever’s left over.
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