Truck Driver Safety: Crash Tests, Fatality Data and Practical Choices

What the U.S. data says

IIHS reports 920 large-truck occupant deaths in 2024, within 5,340 deaths among all people in crashes involving large trucks. Of the truck-occupant deaths, 47% involved rollover and 58% occurred in single-vehicle crashes. These groups can overlap.

The published mileage-adjusted figure is 0.28 large-truck occupant deaths per 100 million truck miles. It combines drivers and passengers across a broad truck category, not just long-haul semis. It is not a personalized occupational risk estimate or a comparison adjusted for route, mileage, driver or load. IIHS Fatality Facts 2024: large trucks.

A fatal-crash involvement rate answers a different question: a truck can be involved in a fatal crash even when everyone inside the truck survives. Keep that distinction when interpreting company safety claims.

Are trucks crash-tested?

IIHS began evaluating cargo vans and Class 3 pickups in June 2026. Its first assessment checks standard driver airbags, belt pretensioners and force limiters, plus a track-tested belt reminder. It does not crash-test the effectiveness of those components. This provides useful equipment evidence for the evaluated work vehicles, but not a crashworthiness ranking of tractor cabs or completed RV conversions. IIHS commercial-vehicle evaluation launch.

IIHS published its first crash-avoidance ratings for these vehicles on October 8, 2026, and they are poor. Of 11 work vehicles tested, 7 rate Poor at avoiding a front crash with another vehicle and only 1 rates Good. Automatic emergency braking has been near-universal and mostly effective on passenger vehicles for years; on this fleet it is neither.

IIHS's first crash avoidance evaluations of commercial vans and Class 3 pickups. These are front crash prevention tests only. IIHS has not crash-tested these vehicles for occupant protection, so they carry no Top Safety Pick award and are not part of this site's safety score. IIHS: cargo vans and work pickups struggle in crash avoidance tests, released 2026-10-08.

Read these as two different risks. The vehicle-to-vehicle column is mostly about the driver and the car in front. The pedestrian column is about everyone outside the van, and delivery vans spend their day in exactly the places people walk. A van that rates Poor on both, like the Express 2500 and the Savana 2500, protects neither.

What NHTSA has tested, which is not nothing

IIHS has not crash-tested any of these vehicles for occupant protection. NHTSA has, but only in patches, and mostly on the wrong body. Of the 11 vehicles IIHS evaluated for crash avoidance, 5 carry any published NHTSA star rating at all.

NHTSA rates very little of this fleet, and what it rates is mostly the passenger wagon rather than the cargo van a converter or courier actually buys. A blank is not a pass; it means no test was published. Where a rating is marked passenger-only, it was published for the window-van or wagon body. That body differs from the cargo version in glazing, seating, load and center of gravity, so it should not be read across. Retrieved 2026-10-21 from NHTSA's public SafetyRatings API. No rating exists for the ProMaster, BrightDrop 400, RCV-Delivery 500, F-350, Silverado 3500HD, Sierra 3500, 3500.

Read the two programs together and they disagree. The Mercedes-Benz Sprinter is the only van IIHS rates Good at avoiding a crash, and it carries NHTSA's lowest rollover score, one star. The Ford Transit rates Poor at avoidance and is the best-tested vehicle here: three stars frontal, five side. A van that is good at not hitting things is not necessarily good at protecting you when it does, and on this fleet the two are close to inverted.

The cargo caveat matters more than it sounds. NHTSA's side and rollover results are for passenger wagons. If you are buying a cargo van to convert or to run a route, the only figure that describes your vehicle is the Transit's three-star frontal result. Everything else was measured on a different body.

Europe rates two of these five stars

Euro NCAP runs a commercial van program, and the two vans IIHS rates Poor at avoiding a crash both hold five stars there.

Euro NCAP's van program scores Safe Driving, Crash Avoidance and Post Crash Safety. The two ratings below were awarded in 2025 and carry no crash-protection score. These are the European specifications, not the vehicles IIHS tested. EU General Safety Regulation requirements mean a European van carries driver-assistance equipment a US one need not. The gap below is most likely a difference in what the two markets sell, not a disagreement about the same vehicle. Not rated by Euro NCAP: Mercedes-Benz Sprinter, Chevrolet Express, GMC Savana, Chevrolet BrightDrop 400, Rivian RCV-Delivery 500. Euro NCAP commercial vehicles, retrieved 2026-10-22.

The most likely explanation is not that one program is wrong. It is that these are not the same vans. European vans must meet EU General Safety Regulation requirements that a US work van need not, so the Transit Euro NCAP scored at 93% for crash avoidance carries equipment the Transit IIHS rated may not have. The lesson for a buyer here is narrow and worth stating plainly: a five-star European rating on a nameplate tells you very little about the version sold in America.

What is actually coming

A crash test for vans exists now, and no van has taken it. From 2026 the van protocol adds an assessment of the protection a van offers its occupants: an offset frontal test with dummies, front structure compatibility, pedestrian and cyclist impactors and side impact protection. Vans are also tested with standard equipment only from 2026, so a rating will describe the weakest configuration in a range rather than the best.

No van has been published under that protocol yet. Checked 22 October 2026: all nine vans Euro NCAP lists carry 2025 ratings, including the Transit and the Ducato, while every truck on the same page is already 2026. So the crash test exists on paper and no van has been through it in public. A 2026-or-later rating will therefore mean something the five-star 2025 ratings do not, but there is nothing yet to wait for by name.

IIHS says it will keep evaluating Class 3 pickups through this year and next, adding headlight and rear automatic emergency braking ratings, and will phase in Class 4-6 trucks later with no date given. It has announced no plan to crash-test any of these for occupant protection. So the gap on this page is real but it is not permanent, and it is closing from Europe rather than from here. A 2026-or-later Euro NCAP van rating will mean something the 2025 ratings above do not.

What the real-world fatality record shows

Our FARS extract counts 1,298 occupant deaths in full-size and work vans across 2020–2024, against 3,684 in minivans over the same five years.

What happened to the driver when one of these did crash

Counts alone cannot rank these vans, and sales figures would not fix that: a van sold in 2020 has five years on the road against one year for a 2024 van, and a parcel van covers several times the mileage of a camper on the same chassis. Dividing deaths by units sold makes a number shaped like a rate that answers no question.

One thing the data does support needs no exposure estimate at all. Among vans of each nameplate that were already in a fatal crash, how often did the van's own driver die? Every vehicle has exactly one driver, so unlike occupant deaths this is not distorted by how many people were aboard — and that matters, because a Chevrolet Express averages 3.41 occupants against a Sprinter's 1.62.

Among vans of this nameplate involved in a fatal crash, the share whose own driver died. There is no exposure denominator here and none is needed. This is conditional on a fatal crash having happened, so it cannot say how often these vans crash, only what tended to happen to the driver when one did. Not adjusted for the kind of crash each nameplate tends to have. A van driven mostly on motorways will crash at higher speeds than one on city delivery rounds, and that difference is inside these numbers. Source: NHTSA FARS, final files, retrieved 2026-10-22.

The Express and the Savana sit at the wrong end of this table as well as the IIHS one, and their intervals do not overlap the Transit's. The Transit is the other way round: Poor at avoiding a crash, among the best at the driver surviving one. That is the same split the NHTSA stars showed, arriving from completely different data.

Those are counts, not rates, and the difference is the whole point. FARS records every fatal crash but carries no registration or mileage denominator, so a smaller number here may only mean fewer vans on the road or fewer miles driven, not a safer vehicle. Minivans outnumber work vans enormously in the national fleet. Nothing in these counts supports ranking one body type against another, and we have not tried.

Tests exist, but a “safety rating” need not describe cab protection. Euro NCAP’s current truck program assesses safe driving, crash avoidance and post-crash functions. It says it does not presently evaluate passive crash protection; restraint assessments are planned for 2028 and work toward a whole-vehicle crash test targets 2031. Those are future plans, not current test results.

Euro NCAP also says buyers should match the optional equipment fitted to the tested vehicle. European results are not automatically transferable to a U.S. truck with a similar brand name. Euro NCAP truck testing and scope.

For a purchase, ask for the exact cab and model-year test report: loading, impact direction, survival space, dummy injury measurements, restraint configuration and who conducted the test. A cab-strength demonstration, regulatory compliance statement and independent occupant-injury comparison are different kinds of evidence. We have not verified a comparable consumer crashworthiness ranking across U.S. tractor models.