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Do five star crash test ratings therefore overstate the COMPARATIVE safety of small cars? Or do they account for the risk reduction of larger cars? Eg https://www.ancap.com.au/safety-ratings?is_current_model=tru...

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Crash test ratings are generally scoped to within the "vehicle class." So a 5-star sedan is safer than a 3-star sedan, but there's no way to directly compare to the star-rating of a vehicle in a different class. (For example, the rating tells you nothing about how it compares to a 4-star SUV... though we can speculate the 5-star sedan is probably less safe because of the massive size difference.)

The only way to have a global metric would be via underlying objective data. The only data I've found for that is "vehicle death rates per 10 billion miles," which is here. [1]

The data is a few years old (and was a bit difficult to find!), but I relied on it a lot when I was car-shopping recently.

[1]: https://www.iihs.org/api/datastoredocument/status-report/pdf...

This makes sense yet I never really thought about it to be honest. Here's the same things with a filter-able table version

https://www.iihs.org/ratings/driver-death-rates-by-make-and-...

They revised the tests recently to use a bigger car going faster, so they are taking this into account.

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