Sacrificing safety is not the way to make cars affordable (IIHS)

The average new vehicle today costs a whopping $50,000. But don’t blame safety: For half that amount, you can find a vehicle with state-of-the-art engineering to protect you and your family in the event of a crash as well as proven technologies to keep you from crashing in the first place.

Take, for example, the 2026 Mazda 3, a small car. The manufacturer’s suggested retail price for its base model? $24,550. A bit more can get you a 2026 Hyundai Kona, a small SUV. Prefer a Honda Accord, Toyota Camry or Subaru Forester? Each starts at under $30,000.

These aren’t bargain basement vehicles. All five earn the 2025 IIHS Top Safety Pick+ award, the highest accolade we give. All the base models provide the highest level of crash protection along with standard automatic emergency braking with pedestrian detection and standard lane departure warning and prevention. I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend them to my own friends and family.

Vehicle affordability was a through line during a U.S. House subcommittee hearing on auto safety and innovation in January and is expected to be a major theme when auto executives appear before the Senate Commerce Committee on a yet-to-be-determined date.

Amid these discussions, some people have suggested that safety is too expensive. They want to abandon the development of lifesaving technologies and halt efforts to expand access to them. But as the examples above make clear, a safe car doesn’t have to cost a lot. Giving up on safety progress, on the other hand, will have very real costs — in terms of both dollars and lives.

Investing in safety

In the 1950s, automakers, advocates and policymakers began to focus on how to make automobiles less dangerous for drivers and passengers. One of the first innovations was the seat belt, which is estimated to have saved more than 450,000 lives between 1968 and 2019.

As time went on, more lifesaving features were developed and, as they proved their effectiveness, incorporated into federal safety standards to ensure they would be included on every new vehicle. These included frontal airbags, which had saved an estimated 70,000 lives by the end of 2019, and electronic stability control, which had saved an estimated 29,000.

IIHS has been a part of this evolution. Our crash tests have led to changes in vehicle designs that provide better protection for drivers and passengers during a collision. Our crash avoidance ratings as well as a voluntary industry commitment we helped broker have led to the proliferation of automatic emergency braking — technology that cuts rates of front-to-rear crashes in half and rates of pedestrian crashes by a quarter. Our efforts give an important boost to safety innovations, but government mandates are key for ensuring that everyone has access to lifesaving features.

Of course, none of these safety innovations are free. There are costs associated with the new components and with integrating them into the vehicle. However, the benefits in terms of crashes prevented or mitigated and fatalities or injuries avoided far outweigh these costs.

Read “Sacrificing safety is not the way to make cars affordable” to learn more.