Sacrificing safety is not the way to make cars affordable

By David Harkey
President, IIHS-HLDI

The average new vehicle today costs a whopping $50,000. But don’t blame safety: For half that amount, you can find a vehicle with state-of-the-art engineering to protect you and your family in the event of a crash as well as proven technologies to keep you from crashing in the first place.

Take, for example, the 2026 Mazda 3, a small car. The manufacturer’s suggested retail price for its base model? $24,550. A bit more can get you a 2026 Hyundai Kona, a small SUV. Prefer a Honda Accord, Toyota Camry or Subaru Forester? Each starts at under $30,000.

These aren’t bargain basement vehicles. All five earn the 2025 IIHS Top Safety Pick+ award, the highest accolade we give. All the base models provide the highest level of crash protection along with standard automatic emergency braking with pedestrian detection and standard lane departure warning and prevention. I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend them to my own friends and family.

Vehicle affordability was a through line during a U.S. House subcommittee hearing on auto safety and innovation last week and is expected to be a major theme when auto executives appear before the Senate Commerce Committee on a yet-to-be-determined date.

Amid these discussions, some people have suggested that safety is too expensive. They want to abandon the development of lifesaving technologies and halt efforts to expand access to them. But as the examples above make clear, a safe car doesn’t have to cost a lot. Giving up on safety progress, on the other hand, will have very real costs — in terms of both dollars and lives.

Investing in safety

In the 1950s, automakers, advocates and policymakers began to focus on how to make automobiles less dangerous for drivers and passengers. One of the first innovations was the seat belt, which is estimated to have saved more than 450,000 lives between 1968 and 2019.

As time went on, more lifesaving features were developed and, as they proved their effectiveness, incorporated into federal safety standards to ensure they would be included on every new vehicle. These included frontal airbags, which had saved an estimated 70,000 lives by the end of 2019, and electronic stability control, which had saved an estimated 29,000.

IIHS has been a part of this evolution. Our crash tests have led to changes in vehicle designs that provide better protection for drivers and passengers during a collision. Our crash avoidance ratings as well as a voluntary industry commitment we helped broker have led to the proliferation of automatic emergency braking — technology that cuts rates of front-to-rear crashes in half and rates of pedestrian crashes by a quarter. Our efforts give an important boost to safety innovations, but government mandates are key for ensuring that everyone has access to lifesaving features.

Of course, none of these safety innovations are free. There are costs associated with the new components and with integrating them into the vehicle. However, the benefits in terms of crashes prevented or mitigated and fatalities or injuries avoided far outweigh these costs.

In 2019, for example, the societal value of federal motor vehicle safety standards outpaced their cost to consumers by a factor of 23 to 1, according to an analysis by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. The agency calculated the cost to consumers at $38 billion, while the societal value, which includes both economic costs and lost quality of life, totaled $881 billion. That is a sound return on investment that can be measured in dollars but means so much more in lives saved and harm prevented.

What’s really driving high prices

The average new vehicle is expensive, and that’s actually a problem for safety. The higher prices go, the longer Americans hold on to older vehicles that lack the crash protection and safety systems of more recent models.

But safety features aren’t the main thing pushing up prices. Buyers are paying more for convenience features such as hands-free power liftgates, puddle lights and automatically retracting mirrors. Size is also a major factor: Americans continue to gravitate toward larger vehicles. The popular Ford F-150 pickup starts at $39,330, with higher trim levels starting at more than $70,000.

Even those who buy less expensive models often choose to load them with optional features that have nothing to do with safety. The Mazda 3 I mentioned above will cost you $36,740 if you choose the Turbo Premium Plus instead of the lowest trim level. Among other things, the extra money will get you more horsepower, special wheels, a leather interior and a Bose sound system. You can add even more optional features and run the price up to nearly $40,000. Personally, I like my heated seats, but I count on my car’s seat belts, airbags and automatic emergency braking to keep me and my family safe.

No time to retreat

Despite the remarkable progress made in vehicle safety, the U.S. lags behind other developed nations in reducing traffic fatalities, and in recent years, road deaths have been trending the wrong way.

In response, IIHS launched 30x30, a vision to put the country back on the right track by cutting road deaths 30% by 2030. Doing so will require policy changes to address risky behavior such as speeding and impaired driving and changes to infrastructure to improve pedestrian and bicyclist safety. It will also require us to double down on vehicle safety, preserving recent gains and continuing to push for advancements. Automakers should absolutely look for ways to cut costs for consumers but not at the expense of people’s lives.