Friday the 13th is one of the unluckiest days of the year if one is prone to superstition. But for some vehicles, a lack of luck is hardly limited to just one day annually.
In October, the national Highway Loss Data Institute released its list of best and worst vehicles for insurance losses.
The HLDI analyzed 2012 to 2014 model year vehicles according to how often personal injury protection insurance claims were filed. Such claims insure against expenses for injuries in crashes with insured drivers and their passengers, regardless of who was at fault.
The results are generally good predictors for more recent versions of the same vehicles, the institute says, unless the model went through a significant redesign.
Cars with higher than average personal injury protection claims tend to have lower horsepower and are “overwhelmingly smaller cars,” said Matt Moore, vice president of the HLDI, the nonprofit sister organization of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, based in Arlington, Va.
“It’s simply representative of the fact that when cars crash, they typically crash with other vehicles,” Moore said. “When you’re smaller than average, the laws of physics take effect and the vehicle is more likely to sustain more damage and therefore the occupants would be subject to higher injury risk.”
Vehicles that score well for personal injury protection insurance losses are, counterintuitively, high-performance vehicles that aren’t typically driven daily, Moore added. The Porsche 911 Carrera, for instance, had the lowest claim rate for personal injury protection insurance – 75 percent less than average.
Claim rates are relative to the number of insured vehicles of the particular model, to avoid weighting claims based on vehicle popularity.
Click through the slideshow to see the unluckiest 10.
Contact the writer: scarpenter@ocregister.com
