If you’ve spent any time on American roads, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety’s latest death-rate study probably won’t surprise you. Physics still matters. Smaller vehicles generally fare worse when they collide with something much larger, while vehicles with lots of horsepower sometimes attract drivers more willing to explore the upper area of the speedometer.

 

The surprise isn’t that those trends showed up in the data. It’s that the biggest trucks appeared on the list for an entirely different reason.