[slowmover]

The questions which underlie “safety” are the thing. Good luck finding the definitions. Exclusions or inclusions make it or break it. Pickup-based vehicles have a high rollover propensity. It’s built-in. While rollovers are but 3% of accidents, they are 25% of fatalities. Serious injuries (life-changing) ARE NOT included because so many of them can’t easily be quantified and/or show up much later.

Safety is first stability. Second, it is steering & handling. Third is braking. (Basics).

Do Prius crowd the Interstate? Hardly. Their numbers are generated within metro regions. Suburb to suburb work commuters. 9-5 people.

Etc

Profit drives what you’ll mainly find. Collusion between those entities making a profit determine results in advance. It’s childs play.

A Charger is mainly an example. So find another fleet car currently in production to compare. Not fleet? No accurate comparison. And take the original Mercedes’s model off of which it’s based to also compare. Go drive examples.

OP, you wish to base a car purchase on whatever grounds, but I’ve always had to skew data to more accurately reflect my costs. Plug in real data from your records of the past decade (you have those, right?).

Last year you drove X-miles with Y-gallons at Z-cost. Your fuel expenditure in cents-per-mile was?

Your isolated volunteer miles cost (with any deductions) was?

The associated costs of ownership? (Depreciation is always ignored). The higher annual tires & brakes cost? All on a per miles basis. You’ve taken on a high subsidy cost. What is it for the details of car ownership? It’s a helluva lot more than just fuel.

Do these before you finish with the rest. Even if guesstimates.

To circle back to accident statistics, you’ll find that those living rural and accumulating 30-40,000-miles annually are in a greater risk category. Poor roads, poor lighting, inattentive drivers, etc. It’s a basic that the more miles annually, the higher risk of injury. The eye-popper is WHERE the miles are run.

Being gun-shot or in a car wreck. Avoid those two and you’ll live a long life. Nothing else short of war else is even close for mortality. Obese, chain-smoker with an asbestos-removal job is better than the single incident of being shot or in a wreck.

Thus:

Independent suspension, rack & pinion steering, 4-whl disc, and low center of gravity with 120” wheelbase and 4,000-lb curb weight is the highway standard. Deviate too much and one has missed the mark.

Fuel economy is more about how well you use it. What’s the spread from city to highway at present? I can do 12% with my four-ton pickup; zero stunt driving; above 20-mpg all miles. 24-Highway, 21-City. (This isn’t “best”, it’s average).

The “best” vehicle isn’t the one with lowest fuel burn, it’s the one that otherwise best suits conditions. Number of passengers, and percent that is rural highway miles. Fit the vehicle to the job.

Your fuel cost is discipline-dependent as the chief factor, once accurate vehicle specification is summarized. . Not otherwise.

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