The Honda FR-V Is the Unluckiest Car in Britain

We’ve really grown to love reporting on studies from Confused.com, a UK-based car insurance price comparison website. A couple of weeks back, the brought us tremendous insight into what Britain’s hairdressers consider the right sort of car for their needs, and now we can report what the unluckiest car in the country is.

The answer should be obvious from the title and the picture we provided: it’s the Honda FR-V, a compact 6-seater minivan marketed in Europe and Japan from 2004 to 2009.

"Car accidents are rarely a result of mechanical failures: they are more often caused by human error or just bad fortune. It could be that drivers of this model happen to be more careless or reckless than other motorists. Or it could simply be that this group of road users has been particularly unlucky in the period when the data was collected," Confused.com's head of car insurance, Gareth Kloet said.

So why exactly should we consider the FR-V unlucky? Well, of the 2,529 owners of the model that were involved in the study, 466 made accident claims in the past five years, which is equal to a claim rate of 18.4 per cent, or close to one in five. What we think is happening is that people who are less interested in driving well are buying the cheap affordable minivan, which could be interpreted as the FR-V being actually unlucky in the owners its gets.

The runner up for the unluckiest vehicle in Britain is Volvo's XC90, while the third placed car was the Lexus RX. The Honda Jazz and CR-V, Volkswagen Touran, Toyota RAV4 and the Mazda3 all place high in the study... proving our point to some degree.