Here’s Why You Probably Shouldn’t Put Your Brand-New Teenage Driver In The Biggest Vehicle You Can Find

Learning to drive has been a rite of passage for teenagers for just about forever. A car offers a teenager the kind of freedom they’ve never had before, but being a new driver also comes with risks. Parents naturally want to keep their kids safe by surrounding them in as huge a bank vault as possible. However, buying your kid the biggest pickup truck or SUV you can find could come with some consequences in a crash, and here’s why you might want to pass on that idea.

This subject has skidded across my desk after an offhand comment that I made on social media. If you follow my work, you know that I prefer to log off the moment I get done with work for the day. Unlike my wife, I don’t really care about social media. I couldn’t care less about Reels, Shorts, Snaps, TikToks, or whatever app people use. But there are times when I emerge from the shadows, post something, and then go back to living my life.

One of those times happened earlier this week. I opened up Threads to see what my wife has been posting, and I suppose that since the algorithm knows I like cars, one of the posts I saw was a parent talking about what cars they were going to buy their kids. To save you from visiting Threads, I’ll just post it as a quote:

Do not put your kid in a subcompact car when they get their license.
Corolla. Civic.
I wouldn’t even put them in a sedan.
Do you want them to survive their first accident or not?
My son will drive an F-150 and my daughter will drive an Expedition.

If you want to read the whole thing, click here.

The first thing that bugged me was the notion that a Toyota Corolla and a Honda Civic are “subcompact” cars. Maybe many decades ago, but not today. These cars are in a larger class called compacts, even though that is almost a misnomer, given how big today’s cars are. I suppose there’s a non-zero chance he was just naming two models he wouldn’t put his kid in, not saying they’re subcompacts, but it’s hard to tell.

Then there was that second part, where this person said that they were going to put brand-new drivers in a Ford F-150 and a Ford Expedition based on the idea that such vehicles were what they needed to survive a crash. Now, look, I should have scrolled on and read my wife’s posts as I intended, but this post got me hook, line, and sinker. I made a reply that explained that Corollas and Civics aren’t subcompacts, modern cars across all classes are remarkably safe, and that there are hidden dangers in putting first-time drivers in vehicles with high centers of gravity, high weights, and great size.

I then proceeded with my day, not thinking about my comment. As it turned out, this comment went viral. I’m such a lurker on social media that this, to my knowledge, was the first time I’ve ever made a viral comment on social media. Clearly, thousands of people care about this. But why?

Bigger Is Usually Safer

Buying a safe car isn’t as simple as buying the largest vehicle your money can buy. Likewise, a car that’s safe for one person can actually be dangerous for another person.

On July 31, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) published the results of a study into which modern cars are the safest and which ones were the least safe, based on fatality figures. The study tracked deaths from 2021 to 2024 in Model Year 2023 and older vehicles.

Some of what IIHS found out wasn’t particularly surprising. From IIHS:

More than half of the model 2023 vehicles with the highest driver death rates are small cars, sports cars or muscle cars, a new report from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety shows.

“Even the safest small cars don’t fare well in crashes with large pickups and heavy SUVs,” IIHS President David Harkey said.
“Powerful engines and marketing that attracts aggressive drivers is the issue for sports cars and muscle cars. They’re dangerous mainly because of how they’re driven.”

IIHS has been calculating driver death rates approximately every three years since 1989. This year marks the second time IIHS also calculated the “other-driver death rate” — the number of drivers in other vehicles killed in crashes with each model. Size and power define the worst models on that list too, but it’s the biggest vehicles that are most dangerous to others. Ten of the top 20 are large or very large pickups, including several heavy-duty variants with more powerful engines. Across all makes and models, the average driver death rate was 37 drivers per million registration years. The average other-driver death rate was 53. The other-driver death rate was most likely higher than the driver death rate because many of the crash partner vehicles were of older vintage and offered occupants less protection.

Some of this is just physics at work. If you crash a small and light vehicle like a Kia Rio into something big and heavy like a Ford F-150 crew cab, the big truck is going to win the fight. As someone who owns five Smart Fortwos, which was once the smallest modern car sold in America, this is something I’ve always been cognizant of.

It’s not that these cars are unsafe. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. Today’s cars are built with the benefit of decades of safety research, innovations, and engineering. IIHS has a great way of showing this, too. Every once in a while, IIHS likes to smash a modern car into its vintage equivalent. The vintage car always loses, and it’s not even close. Those old beasts might have been heavy metal, but they crumple like beer cans and compromise their passenger compartments. Watch a 2026 Chevy Blazer obliterate a 1996 Chevy Blazer:

However, as the IIHS has said over the years, there are several factors that make larger vehicles the winners in crashes against small vehicles. Something to keep in mind is that, when IIHS, NHTSA, or other organizations perform crash testing, they are tossing cars into walls or having sleds ram the car. The kinetic energy is provided by the vehicle’s own weight. The tests do not show what happens when the vehicle crashes into something that is heavier than it is. IIHS notes:

Both size and weight affect the forces people inside a vehicle experience during a crash. The magnitude of those forces is directly related to the risk of injury. Larger vehicles have a longer distance from the front of the vehicle to the occupant compartment. The longer that distance, the more the frame of the vehicle can be crushed before it crushes the people inside. Long front ends only provide more protection in frontal crashes, but these crashes account for more than half of passenger vehicle occupant deaths.

Weight is important when two vehicles collide. The heavier vehicle will push the lighter one backward during the impact. That puts less force on the people inside the heavier vehicle and more on the people in the lighter vehicle.
IIHS demonstrated the role of size and weight in a series of crash tests in 2019, pairing a midsize SUV and small car made by Kia and a large car and minicar made by Toyota in collisions with each other. Both smaller vehicles, the 2018 Kia Forte and 2018 Toyota Yaris iA, had good ratings in the five IIHS tests relevant to driver protection, but they performed poorly in collisions with the larger vehicles.

Improvements in crash protection have made vehicles of all sizes safer, but bigger vehicles are still safer than smaller ones even with those improvements. As the chart below illustrates, crash deaths decline as vehicle size increases. A similar chart using weight instead of size would look almost the same.

But Bigger Isn’t Always Better

Everything I have given you thus far supports the guy’s point. Even IIHS generally agrees that bigger is safer. So why shouldn’t you just go out and buy your kid a Ram 3500 right now? The unfortunate fact is that while a pickup truck might protect its occupants, it is disastrous for everyone else. From IIHS:

The model with the highest driver death rate was the Kia Rio, with 170 deaths per million registration years. The Ram 3500 crew cab long bed four-wheel-drive had the highest other-driver death rate, at 204 deaths per million registration years. Eighteen out of the 20 models with the lowest driver death rates are SUVs, including four small, nine midsize, four large and one very large model. Six models had death rates of 0.

The Chevrolet Camaro, Chevrolet Malibu and the two-wheel-drive versions of the Dodge Charger and Dodge Charger HEMI feature among both the models with the highest driver death rates and those with the highest other-driver death rates. All but one of the six models that feature among the vehicles with both the lowest driver and other-driver death rates are luxury SUVs.

The models on both these lists are the BMW X5 four-wheel-drive, BMW X7 four-wheel-drive, Porsche Cayenne four-wheel-drive, Volkswagen Atlas four-wheel-drive, Volvo XC60 four-wheel-drive and Volvo XC90 four-wheel-drive. The rates include only driver deaths because all vehicles on the road have drivers, but not all of them have passengers or the same number of passengers. The number of deaths is derived from the federal Fatality Analysis Reporting System. Registration data come from Mobility Global.

To put that first paragraph in other words, Ram 3500 pickup trucks kill other drivers in crashes more often than the drivers of Kia Rios die in crashes. In fact, the list of vehicles that kill other drivers the most is almost entirely populated by pickup trucks, SUVs, and muscle cars. From IIHS:

According to the IIHS report, trucks don’t even have the lowest death rate for their own drivers. According to IIHS, the vehicle class that has the lowest deaths per million registered vehicle years is “very large luxury cars,” with 7 deaths per million registered vehicle years. Second to that is “large luxury SUVs” with 10 deaths per million registered vehicle years. Small pickup trucks come in at 31, large pickup trucks are at 29, and very large pickup trucks land at 24.

For comparison, the worst is the class that IIHS calls minicars, which have 158 deaths per million registered vehicle years. IIHS notes elsewhere that large SUVs and trucks are also known to kill more pedestrians and cyclists than smaller vehicles. Basically, a truck will probably protect you or your teenager fairly well, but will also leave you more likely to kill someone else in a crash. That doesn’t even mention the psychological toll of being in a crash where the other person dies.

Teenagers Are Terrible Drivers

Even after all of this, there’s another thing you need to consider. Teenagers are bad drivers and have crash rates over four times greater than adults. They have poor car control, don’t really know what they’re doing, and are piloting a multi-thousand-pound missile with all of the distractions of the world going on around them. They don’t have the experience to know to slow down for rain, snow, or ice. They don’t know the proper speeds to take a corner. Also, I was a teenager once, and I remember how I thought I was invincible. I did dumb things with cars back then that I’d never do today.

If you take a peek at the IIHS list of picks for teen drivers, there isn’t a single pickup truck on the list, and the largest SUV class is mid-size. IIHS is pretty clear on why:

As in past years, the list doesn’t include anything with excessive horsepower relative to weight or anything marketed for performance. However, many seemingly benign vehicles come in high-horsepower versions, so even when shopping from the IIHS-CR list, families should make sure to stick to the base engine. Powerful vehicles can entice young drivers to take risks or lead them to speed inadvertently.

Minicars, as well as anything under 2,750 pounds, are also excluded. Although smaller models tend to be popular with young drivers, they can’t protect their occupants adequately in crashes with bigger vehicles.

On the flip side, large SUVs and large pickups aren’t a good choice for inexperienced drivers because they can be hard to handle and take longer to stop. They also pose more risk to others on the road, including pedestrians, bicyclists, and people in smaller vehicles.

It’s also notable that large trucks and SUVs may roll more easily than smaller vehicles, especially if your teen outfits them with lift kits and larger tires.

Thus, the sweet spot is somewhere in the middle. You don’t want to give your teen the largest possible vehicle at a time when they have no idea what they’re doing behind the wheel. As evidenced by IIHS findings, that could be a recipe for a life-altering disaster. However, it’s also true that maybe you don’t want to buy your kid that used Chevy Spark. Instead, IIHS recommends something like a Mazda 3, Toyota Camry, Subaru Forester, or a Volvo XC90. Check out the full list here.

The Choice Is Yours

Of course, none of this is really written in stone. Even the safest cars in the world have had fatalities. Likewise, many folks have grown up driving terrible, unsafe cars and gotten through unscathed. My first car was a 2001 Kia Rio that had a body of rust and an only halfway functional cooling system. I drove that car like a maniac.

Ultimately, as a parent, the decision is up to you. Buy your kid whatever you want. I suppose your teen should also have some input, too. However, I think that whatever decision you do make, it should be an informed one. Don’t just blindly buy a model on the assumption that it’s safe. Be sure to do some research and know what you and your teen are getting into. If you and your teen decide the risk of a certain vehicle is worth it, at least you decided from an informed place.

Above all else, I also recommend defensive driving classes and then, later, advanced driving classes. High school Driver’s Ed classes sometimes just teach you the basics, which is fine. But actually knowing how to handle a car rather than just drive it could potentially save your life one day. It’s also really fun, too. But no matter what you do, be safe out there!

Top photo: Ford/Chevy