Five-star safety rating. It's on every listing, every brochure, every dealer's chalkboard. And it means far less than it did a decade ago — not because cars got worse, but because almost all of them now clear the bar.
Three quarters of cars are five stars
Across NHTSA overall ratings in our data, 75.7% of model years since 2015 score five stars. Before 2015 it was 44.4%. The distribution has collapsed toward the top.
| Overall rating | Model years | What it tells you |
|---|---|---|
| 5 stars | 1,626 | Most cars |
| 4 stars | 697 | Below average now |
| 3 stars | 15 | Rare |
| 2 stars | 4 | Very rare |
Look at the bottom of that table. Fifteen model years at three stars, four at two. A rating that almost nobody fails is not a filter — it's a formality.
Why this happened
Mostly because it worked. Stability control, side curtain airbags and stronger structures became standard, and the fleet genuinely got safer. A test designed to separate cars in 2010 can't separate cars that all now pass it.
The consequence for a buyer is that "five stars" tells you a car is normal, not that it's good. If you're comparing two vehicles and both wear five stars — which they probably do — the rating has given you nothing, and you need to look at the sub-scores: frontal, side and rollover are rated separately, and they don't move together.
Rollover is the one worth checking on anything tall. It's where safety ratings still separate vehicles meaningfully, because physics doesn't care how many airbags you added.
How I read it now
I treat the overall star count as a pass/fail gate — four stars or below on a modern car is a genuine warning, since so few land there. Everything above that, I ignore in favour of the individual categories and the recall record.
And I check the specific vehicle rather than the model line, because ratings change between model years as platforms get updated. Running the VIN returns the crash-test scores tied to that exact car alongside its open recalls.
Frequently asked questions
What percentage of cars get five stars?
About 75.7% of model years from 2015 onward in our data, compared with 44.4% before 2015.
Is a four-star car unsafe?
Not unsafe, but it is now below average — so few modern vehicles score below five that four stars is worth investigating rather than dismissing.
What should I look at instead of the overall rating?
The individual frontal, side and rollover scores, which do not move together, plus the vehicle recall record. Rollover in particular still separates tall vehicles meaningfully.
Denis Kataev is a serial solopreneur and the founder of ForCar. With 15+ years in software engineering and 10 years in SEO, he builds data-driven products end to end — backed by a sharp eye for design. At ForCar he mines proprietary vehicle datasets, turning raw numbers into buying advice you can actually trust.
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