Nobody Crash-Tests America’s Work Trucks. That’s 6,535 Funerals a Year.

Federal law requires your Honda Civic to prove, through a battery of standardized crash tests, that it can protect you in a collision. Federal law does not require the same of the 14,000-pound Ford Super Duty that just merged into your lane. Heavy-duty pickups, cargo vans, box trucks, and delivery vehicles above Class 3 have operated for decades in a regulatory void: no mandated crash testing, no required airbags, no minimum standard for seatbelt technology.^[1] In 2023, crashes involving these vehicles killed 6,535 Americans, roughly 16% of all roadway fatalities, making them the deadliest untested vehicle class on American pavement.^[2]

On June 9, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety released results from its first-ever evaluation of commercial vehicles: three Class 3 pickups and six cargo vans, covering the biggest names in American fleet sales.^[2] IIHS didn't crash them. Not yet. This preliminary round checked something more fundamental: do these trucks even have airbags? Do the seatbelts include pretensioners and force limiters? Does the belt reminder last longer than eight seconds? These are questions nobody had formally asked before, which tells you everything about how the regulatory structure treats the people who drive these vehicles for a living.

Four passed. Five failed.

The 2026 Chevrolet Silverado 3500HD, the 2025 Ford F-350 SuperCrew, the Chevrolet BrightDrop 400, and the Ram ProMaster 2500 checked all five boxes for driver protection. But the Ford Transit T250, Mercedes-Benz Sprinter 2500, Rivian Delivery 500, and Ram 3500 all lacked seatbelt reminders meeting the IIHS standard of 90 seconds of persistent audible and visual alerts. Current federal rules require only 4 to 8 seconds of chime, a window so brief that a commercial driver making a delivery stop might not even register it before the truck goes silent.^[2] IIHS research shows persistent reminders boost belt use by 30%, and that matters enormously for a workforce defined by constant entry and exit from the cab.^[2]

And then there is the Chevrolet Express 2500, which failed on a different level entirely. It lacked an effective seatbelt reminder AND standard seatbelt force limiters, the technology that prevents the belt itself from caving in the driver's chest during a crash by allowing controlled extension after pretensioners have tightened it.^[2] IIHS research on passenger vehicles demonstrates that force limiters are frequently the difference between survivable and fatal chest injury metrics in frontal collisions. GM has been selling the Express since 1996, and after thirty years of continuous production, the 2025 model year still ships without force limiters as standard equipment.

When you cross-reference these results against the FARS fatal crash database, covering 2014 to 2023, the picture sharpens. In the fatal crash database covering 2014 to 2023, the Chevrolet Express accumulates 475 deaths at a rate of 0.92 fatalities per 100 million vehicle miles traveled.^[3] Its direct competitor, the Ford Transit, sits at 0.14 per 100M VMT on 178 deaths over a similar fleet exposure of roughly a million registered units, performing the identical job of commercial cargo hauling at a 6.6-to-1 fatality rate advantage. Both vehicles just failed the IIHS seatbelt reminder check, but only the Express also failed on hardware, which begins to explain why a vehicle designed in the Clinton administration kills drivers at nearly seven times the rate of its modern replacement.

An honest counterargument deserves full airing: this evaluation did not crash-test anything, and the seatbelt reminder failures involve a standard that exceeds current federal requirements, which means these manufacturers broke no law. Commercial drivers are generally professional operators with lower per-mile fatality rates than the general population, and the 6,535 figure includes all crash participants, not just truck or van occupants. IIHS itself acknowledged that this is only the beginning, with headlight evaluations, automatic emergency braking testing, and Class 4-through-6 assessments planned for coming months. Any one manufacturer could address the seatbelt reminder gap with a software update.

Limitations: FARS fatality rates for commercial vehicles carry higher uncertainty than passenger car estimates because fleet size and VMT calculations for the Express and Transit rely on registration extrapolations rather than precise odometer data, introducing an estimated uncertainty range of plus or minus 20% for low-volume commercial models. IIHS evaluated equipment presence rather than crash performance in this initial round, meaning a vehicle passing all five criteria is not proven safe in a collision; it merely possesses the minimum equipment that decades of passenger-vehicle research have shown to be essential. Broader crash-test evaluations have not yet been conducted on any of these nine vehicles.

What to do about it: If you manage a commercial fleet, pull up the IIHS results at iihs.org and make driver protection a procurement criterion, not an afterthought. If you drive a cargo van or heavy-duty pickup for work, open your owner's manual and verify whether your vehicle has front and side airbags, belt pretensioners, and force limiters as standard; the IIHS just proved that "standard in passenger cars" does not mean "present in your work truck." If your employer operates Chevrolet Express vans, the 0.92 per 100M VMT fatality rate and the absence of force limiters are facts worth raising with your safety coordinator, because the federal government has not required GM to fix either one.