The price of vehicle impacts: A simulation-based approach for the identification of property-damage costs and occupants’ injury risk

Despite continuous improvements in vehicle safety, on-road collisions still impose substantial economic losses through both bodily injury and Property Damage (PD) costs. Insurers ultimately bear much of this burden through compensation, making it valuable to anticipate the relationship between PD and injury outcomes before crashes occur. Such insight would enable policies that reward vehicles exhibiting both robust occupant protection and structural resistance. This study examines the link between PD costs and occupants’ Injury Risk (IR) in car-to-car crashes. We first extracted repair and replacement costs for multiple body components across 507 vehicle models. We then developed a simulation-based methodology that reconstructs five of the most frequent impact configurations identified from an in-depth accident database, pairing the subject vehicle against opponents spanning all major body categories. We derived an easily deployable linear regression relating PD to IR and used it to rank vehicle categories by passive safety performance. Superior SUVs emerge as the most crashworthy but also incur the highest PD and exhibit the greatest aggressiveness toward other vehicles’ occupants (i.e., the highest IR for opponents, largely due to greater mass). Minivans present the lowest PD, while A segment vehicles are the least crashworthy and least aggressive across categories.