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

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/55/2 https://www.iihs.org/api/datastoredocument/status-report/pdf...