So there are plenty of lists of which are the best SUV, or best truck, or best coupe, but why can we not have a list of every vehicle from top to bottom?

I guess this is as close as we can get? Lists rates overall.
http://www.iihs.org/iihs/sr/st...eport/article/52/3/1

This brings to mind the year the Rambler American was reportedly the safest car in America. The question then was if it was the car or the drivers? My memory was that if there was a long line of cars driving under the speed limit, a Rambler was in the front.

I'm thinking the reason is that list will basically sort itself by vehicle type anyway. Such that those small car types will consistently be near the bottom of the safety list as a group.

Also, people think about what vehicle type they want to buy, they'll want to filter out vehicle types that they're not interested in.

This list has long been around. Volvo 240 were for a time, the only vehicle rated with zero deaths. The problem with this list is that the car and the driver are comingled as one entity. Those who drive a Corvette obviously are more probable to speed than those in a Lexus RX350. So, a higher death rate is related to driver behavior AND vehicle factors.

How do a vehicle's size and weight affect safety?
All other things being equal, occupants in a bigger, heavier vehicle are better protected than those in a smaller, lighter vehicle. Both size and weight affect the forces people inside a vehicle experience during a crash. The magnitude of those forces is directly related to the risk of injury.

In the case of size, the longer distance from the front of the vehicle to the occupant compartment gives a bigger vehicle an advantage in frontal crashes, which account for half of passenger vehicle occupant deaths. The longer that distance, the bigger the crush zone, and the lower the forces on the occupants.

Weight comes into play in a collision involving two vehicles. The bigger vehicle will push the lighter one backward during the impact. As a result, there will be less force on the occupants of the heavier vehicle and more on the people in the lighter vehicle. Heavier vehicles also fare better in some single-vehicle crashes because they are more likely to move, bend or deform objects they hit.

IIHS demonstrated the role of size and weight in a series of crash tests in 2009 in which a microcar and two minicars were each crashed into a midsize car from the same manufacturer. The Smart Fortwo, Honda Fit and Toyota Yaris all had good ratings in the Institute's moderate overlap frontal test, but all three performed poorly in the crashes with midsize cars. 1

Are people less likely to be killed or injured in a bigger, heavier vehicle?
Yes. Driver death rates calculated by IIHS illustrate the real-world advantages of bigger, heavier vehicles. For example, as a group, in 2015 very large cars 1-3 years old had 22 deaths per million registered vehicles, while minicars had 64. Of the 21 vehicles with the lowest driver death rates from the 2011-14 model years during 2012-15, only one was a small car. Nearly two-thirds of those with the highest rates were small cars or minicars. 2

Improvements in crash protection have made vehicles of all sizes safer, but, as illustrated in the figure below, an advantage persists for bigger vehicles, as measured by shadow, or length times width. Size and weight are highly correlated, so the figure would look similar if weight were used instead.

vehicle shadow (sq ft)
Car driver deaths per million registered vehicle years
1981-84 model cars during 1982-85 (trend)
1991-94 model cars during 1992-95 (trend)
2001-04 model cars during 2002-05 (trend)
2011-14 model cars during 2012-15 (trend)
70
80
90
100
110
120
0
50
100
150
200
What's more important, size or weight?
It's difficult to separate the effect of weight from the effect of size in the real world. However, HLDI did this to some extent by comparing hybrid vehicles with their conventional, nonhybrid twins. 3 These pairs are identical except for the battery packs that give the hybrids extra mass. The analysis of insurance claims found that the odds of being injured in a crash are 25 percent lower for people in hybrids than for people in the nonhybrid versions of the same vehicles. While other factors, including how, when and by whom hybrids are driven also may contribute to their advantage, HLDI concluded that the extra weight is likely a key factor.

HLDI hasn't been able to conduct a similar study to show what role the size of a vehicle's crush zone plays independent of weight because there aren't any vehicle pairs with identical weights and different sizes.

Do bigger vehicles pose a threat to occupants of smaller vehicles?
A lighter vehicle will always be at a disadvantage in a collision with a heavier vehicle. Beyond weight differences, SUVs and pickups historically have posed a danger to people in cars because their energy-absorbing structures didn't line up with those of lower-profile vehicles. As a consequence of such incompatible designs, cars would often underride SUVs and pickups, resulting in more severe damage and a higher risk of injury and death. An analysis of crashes in 2000-01 involving 1997-99 model vehicles showed that SUVs and pickups were much more likely than cars or minivans of the same weight to be involved in crashes that killed occupants of other cars or minivans. 4

This mismatch has faded as a problem in recent years, thanks to new designs of SUVs and pickups. The energy-absorbing structures of these vehicles are now lower so that they line up better with those of cars. The new designs came out of a voluntary agreement forged by automakers, the government and IIHS in 2003. A more recent study of 2008-09 crashes involving 2005-08 models showed that SUVs were no more likely than cars to be in crashes in which occupants of other cars died. 5 Pickups still killed people in other vehicles at a higher rate, but the difference was much smaller than it was previously.

http://www.iihs.org/iihs/topic...ize-and-weight/qanda

The number one safety feature in any vehicle is the driver. No way to figure that into the equation.