IIHS Finally Graded America's Work Trucks. More Than Half Flunked a Checklist.

I ran the numbers, then ran them again, and they only got worse. Five of nine commercial vehicles failed the first safety evaluation IIHS has ever conducted on heavy trucks and cargo vans, and the remarkable part is that nobody crashed anything to find out. Nobody deployed a dummy into a barrier at 40 mph or measured crumple zone deformation on high-speed cameras. It was a five-item checklist: front airbags, side airbags, seatbelt pretensioners, force limiters, and a seatbelt reminder that persists for at least 90 seconds. Five binary questions about whether basic equipment exists inside the cabin, and more than half of America's most popular commercial vehicles couldn't answer yes to all of them.^[1]

Context matters here: 6,535 people died in crashes involving medium- and heavy-duty trucks or light vans in 2023, roughly 16% of all U.S. roadway fatalities, and that figure has approximately doubled over the past seven years.^[1] Federal crash-test standards simply don't apply to these vehicles, which means airbags aren't required and force limiters aren't required. For three decades, regulators have treated the question of whether a delivery driver deserves the same occupant protection as someone commuting in a Civic and collectively answered: not our problem.

Four vehicles passed everything: the Chevy Silverado 3500HD, the Ford F-350 SuperCrew, the Chevy BrightDrop 400, and the Ram ProMaster 2500, each with all five features present and functioning. Everyone else stumbled on seatbelt reminders, that persistent 90-second audible tone IIHS considers essential for work vehicles with constant entry and exit cycles. Federal rules require a chime lasting 4 to 8 seconds, which is roughly long enough to buckle a shoe, let alone a seatbelt, and IIHS data shows persistent reminders increase belt usage among part-time wearers by 30%.^[2]

And then there is the Chevrolet Express 2500, which managed to fail on two separate criteria because it ships without driver-side force limiters in addition to missing an effective seatbelt reminder. Force limiters let the seatbelt give slightly during impact so it distributes force across your chest instead of concentrating it on your sternum; without one, the belt that saves your life from the windshield can simultaneously crack your ribs. This vehicle has been in continuous production since 1996 with minimal structural changes, and our FARS data puts it at 475 deaths over the past decade with a fatality rate of 0.92 per 100 million vehicle miles traveled. For comparison, the Ford Transit, which also failed the reminder check, sits at 0.14 per 100M VMT, meaning Express drivers die at 6.6 times that rate while GM sells the same platform it sold when Bill Clinton was in the White House.^[3]

A fair counterargument: delivery drivers making 200-plus stops per day would rip the seatbelt reminder speaker out of the dashboard by noon, and Congress set the federal standard at 4 to 8 seconds partly because extended alerts push people to disconnect them entirely. Force limiters add per-unit cost to fleets that negotiate on pennies per vehicle, and fleet managers buying on price alone have historically treated occupant protection as a line item to cut. All of that is true, and none of it changes the underlying arithmetic: GM has had three decades to add a part that costs less than the floor mats to a vehicle whose occupants die at nearly seven times the rate of its nearest competitor in the same segment.

What IIHS didn't test matters just as much as what it did. These are equipment audits, not crash tests, and a van that passes all five criteria could still crumple at 35 mph like it was designed by a community college robotics club. Headlight evaluations and automatic emergency braking assessments come next, with Class 4 through Class 6 trucks after that.^[1] FARS captures only fatal crashes, a sliver of the roughly 6.7 million annual U.S. collisions, so low fatality rates don't guarantee low injury rates, and the "doubled in seven years" headline figure for truck-related deaths partly reflects more vehicle miles traveled rather than purely more danger per mile.

What you should do: If your company runs a fleet, pull this scorecard before your next procurement cycle, because the Chevy Express is the cheapest full-size van on the market and now you know exactly what that savings buys. If you personally drive a Ram 3500 or Ford Transit for work, understand that your seatbelt reminder is functionally decorative, so wear the belt regardless because nobody is going to beep you into compliance. And if you're a fleet buyer still ordering Express vans in 2026, I'd genuinely like to see the actuarial math that makes that purchasing decision look smart.