About the Institutes

• IIHS and the Vehicle Research Center
• HLDI
• Milestones
• Member groups

The Highway Loss Data Institute

The Highway Loss Data Institute (HLDI), an affiliate of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS), is a nonprofit research organization that publishes insurance loss statistics on most car, SUV, pickup truck, and motorcycle models on US roads. Sponsored by the automobile insurance industry, HLDI regularly publishes detailed analyses of losses under six insurance coverages — collision, property damage liability, personal injury protection, medical payment, bodily injury liability, and comprehensive (including theft). The database covers more than 150 million individual passenger vehicles, amounting to about 80 percent of all privately insured vehicles on the road. As a result, this is the largest repository of such information in the world.

Organized in 1972 to provide consumers with comparative loss information among vehicles, HLDI helps car buyers make informed choices. Insurance losses vary widely among vehicles under all six coverages — even among vehicles that are similar in size and type. Some competing models may have much lower occupant injury experience than others and may be less expensive to insure. Under a 1993 federal mandate, vehicle dealers are required, upon request, to provide consumers with HLDI information on the differences in collision losses among makes and models of vehicles. Being able to analyze and make such information useful, HLDI has, in fact, become the nation's principal source of public information about insurance losses for automobiles and other passenger vehicles.

HLDI also analyzes the effects of various safety features, such as antilock braking systems and electronic stability control (ESC).

HLDI information continues to be useful to anyone who drives, rides in, or purchases a motor vehicle. For example, one of the first ever findings by HLDI was that collision coverage losses weren't higher for larger car models, although most people had presumed the opposite. It found that smaller cars yielded higher collision coverage losses despite a widespread belief small cars offered greater maneuverability to avoid crashes. More recently, HLDI research revealed that antilock braking systems don't necessarily reduce road crashes while vehicles equipped with ESC clearly showed lower overall collision losses, with reductions ranging from 15 to 17 percent. With this knowledge along with data from IIHS research on ESC, more and more manufacturers have included ESC on their vehicle models, with 51 percent of 2007 models having ESC as standard equipment. The federal government has since required all cars be equipped with ESC technology by 2012 to ensure better safety on the road.

HLDI's work has been modeled around the world. Countries such as Canada, Australia, and South Korea have formed associations that provide similar information, including HLDI's consumer-friendly list of vehicle loss results presented on a model-by-model basis.

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