It's time again for another harrowing installment of Who's Crashing What, hosted by M.C. LandQuail.
According to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (who's really flying those black helicopters) here's the latest (it stops at 2005, but they're working on it) on Who's Crashing What?
The music plays, the wheel spins, and first up, it's Midsize Sedans!
The Audi A4 is the big winner here, being a sturdy 44 percent more likely to have a collision than the average car.
It's likely not all the R4s and RS4s that are to blame, but all the drivers who think their 1.8T grocery getter is one of them.
The good news? The A4 might have the market cornered on collisions, but you've got less chance of being injured in one than you do in the statistically safest midsize sedan, the Saturn LS.
You're 18-percent less likely to crash a Saturn LS than average, probably because with every Saturn purchase comes a lifetime membership to the "International Drive Like a Tired Old Pussy Club," but if you do, you're chances of injury are seven percent greater than average, compared to the Audi's cosseting four percent.
Next up, the hotly contested Midsize Luxury Cars!
Oh, boy, things get interesting here. The obvious winner, in which you're a massive 191 percent more likely to have "an incident" than average, is the BMW M3. We're not all lucky enough to be Hans Stück, though we all aspire to be — often with disastrous results.
Second place is the Lexus IS300, whose drivers tend to try really, really hard to pretend they're in an M3 — with similarly catastrophic results.
For much the same reason as the Saturn LS, the BMW 3-series convertible is the safest midize luxury car, safer even than the 3-series sedan, though the convertible is about average overall.
And now the part we've all been waiting for: Sports Cars!
As could perhaps be expected, the Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution wins out here, being a JAW DROPPIN 328 percent more likely to crash than average, putting it at the top of the IIHS charts. The Subaru WRX (which I guess is all WRXs, STis included) barely tips the scales, comparatively, at 151 percent more likely to crash than average, thought it's still more likely to crash than the accident-prone Honda S2000 (129) and Pontiac GTO (131).
And if you do crash an EVO, you're less likely to be injured than the poor bastards who suffer the indignity of crashing a Suzuki Aerio (yes, that's how they've actually spelled it), which tops the injury charts, leaving its drivers 135 percent more likely to be injured in a crash than the driver of the average car.
Of Note:
You're almost 100 percent more likely to crash a Mercedes S-Class LWB than average, but 35 percent less likely to be injured.
The new Ford Thunderbird is classified by the IIHS as a sports car.
The car least likely to be crashed, statistically, is the Chevy Uplander. It's 50 percent as likely to crash as the average car.
And that's it folks. Check back for another installment of Who's Crashing What in a few years.