The Most Expensive Car To Crash

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Sep 10, 11:49AM EDT

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The CDC reports there are over 2 million car accidents per year in the US. Some are fender benders. In others, the vehicles are totaled.

The IIHS-HLDI looks at losses by model and model class, particularly compared to other vehicles in the same group. Groups include SUVs, cars, cars by category–including “luxury vehicles”– and vehicles by size.

The IIHS-HLDI comparisons of the cost of collisions fall into five categories–” substantially better than average”, “better than average”, average, “worse than average”, and “substantially worse than average.”

One IIHS-HLDI comparison is across all vehicles of all classes against one another. These are “Vehicles with the lowest collision losses.” The lowest losses compared to the average tend to be SUVs and pickups, which are heavy based on weight.

The Ram 2500 crew cab LWB which is part of the “very large pickup” category, has a repair cost of 54% better than average among all vehicles, which puts it at the top of the “substantially better than average yardstick.” cost category.

The car at the top of the “substantially worse than average” list is the BMW M5 4dr 4WD, categorized as a “large luxury car.” Its number is 394%, about the average cost of all vehicles.

The M5 is part of the BMW race car vehicles. The cost of these puts them at the high end of BMWs based on MSRP. That figure is about $125,000. Its replacement parts costs are expensive. So is the labor cost at most BMW dealers.

These are the worst multi-vehicle crashes in modern US history.

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.