GM Statement Regarding Insurance Institute for Highway Safety Study of Driver Death Rates by Passenger Vehicle

Attributable to Alan Adler, manager, Product Safety Communications

GM designs crashworthiness and crash avoidance attributes into all of our vehicles and conducts a battery of tests that replicate an array of potential real-world crashes as part of our commitment to safety before, during and after a crash.

It is impossible in looking at these statistics to know what role driver behavior, such as drunk driving and driving without a safety belt, played in these deaths. We know from decades of work that whether a driver dies in a crash has more to do with behavior than with the vehicle.

It is also essential to know how and where a vehicle was used. Trucks typically are driven at least 50 percent more miles a year than passenger cars and often on secondary roads where more rollover crashes occur, so the pattern of use is much more important than a given design.