Confused.com studied 12 months of quotes, covering 5 years of claims records, to find out which is the make and model of car with the highest accident rates.
1) Top of the list was Honda’s FR-V six-seater: between them, 2,529 owners of these vehicles made 466 accident claims in the past five years. That’s a claim rate of 18.4 per cent or almost one in five.
2) Next came Volvo’s XC90: of the 3,886 drivers of this model who bought cover through Confused.com, 619 made claims for accidents – a rate of 15.9 per cent.
3) The Lexus RX had a claim rate of 15.5 per cent (574 claims out of 3,701 drivers), followed by the Mazda 5 (15.3 per cent, or 373 out of 2,431).
Also in the top 10 vehicles for claims were Honda’s Jazz and CR-V models, Volkswagen’s Touran, the Hyundai Santa, the Toyota Rav and the Mazda 3. Each had a rate of about one accident claim for every seven vehicles insured through insurers on the Confused.com panel.
Lowest claim rates
We also looked at which cars were least likely to be involved in accident claims.
Apparently the ‘safest’ of all was the Mazda 2 TS TD – out of a total of 1,076 owners, only nine accident claims were recorded in the last five years. That makes a claims rate of less than one in 100.
Also hovering around the 1 per cent claims-rate mark were Nissan’s Skyline, the Ford Focus RS and the Fiat Cinquecento.
Confused.com’s head of car insurance, Gareth Kloet said:
“Car accidents are rarely a result of mechanical failures: they are more often caused by human error or just bad fortune. It could be that drivers of this model happen to be more careless or reckless than other motorists. Or it could simply be that this group of road users has been particularly unlucky in the period when the data was collected.”
Confused.com’s statistics show just a snapshot of accident-related claims made by owners of a particular make and model of vehicle. So it is worth stressing that if one particular car appears to have a relatively high rate of claims, it does not follow that this vehicle is inherently more dangerous than others.
This research reflects only the experience of Confused.com customers: other companies’ figures could show different trends.
*Figures are based on quotes from Confused.com, between 11 May 2010 and 11 May 2011, based on all types of accident claims: this means those where the driver of a particular vehicle was at fault as well as cases where the other party took responsibility, and claims where no blame could be apportioned.
Source : Confused.com
