How this works

Where the data comes from

Insurance Bureau of Canada — How Cars Measure Up

Claim-cost indexes come from IBC’s 2025 How Cars Measure Up workbook, the same relative vehicle factors Canadian insurers use. Each row is a make, model, year, body style, and powertrain. Four coverages are published as indexes, plus a theft frequency index.

• Collision — cost of crash-repair claims per insured vehicle.
• Comprehensive — theft, vandalism, hail, and similar non-crash claims.
• DCPD — Direct Compensation Property Damage: when another driver hits you.
• Accident benefits — how often injury claims are filed for that model.
• Theft frequency — theft claims per insured vehicle. Shown on the card, not folded into the composite score.

100 is the average vehicle in that coverage. 70 means about 30% cheaper claims than typical; 150 means about 50% more expensive. A blank in the workbook means fewer than about 1,500 insured vehicles in the study window, so IBC did not publish a number. We keep that as “insufficient data” instead of guessing.

Official background: IBC How Cars Measure Up.

Natural Resources Canada — Fuel Consumption Guide

Fuel use, CO₂, range, and vehicle class come from NRCan’s published ratings (5-cycle figures where available), including gasoline, diesel, hybrid, plug-in hybrid, and battery-electric files. Models that exist only in NRCan (no IBC claim row) still appear for fuel lookup.

Official data: Fuel consumption ratings (Open Government).

The composite claim score

On a vehicle card, the big claims number is a simple average of whichever of the four cost indexes are published: collision, comprehensive, DCPD, and accident benefits. Each coverage counts equally. Theft frequency is listed separately because it is a rate, not a cost index.

Lower is usually cheaper to insure for the vehicle itself. It still ignores you, your city, deductibles, coverage limits, and the car’s value. Insurers weight coverages differently and add many other factors. Treat 92 vs 108 as a directional signal, not a premium.

Fuel efficiency ranks

Rank 1 uses the least energy. We compare unique make/model names in that model year (and again inside the NRCan class, such as small SUV). Combined L/100 km is used when NRCan publishes it. Plug-in hybrids use litres-equivalent. Battery-electric models are converted with kWh/100 km ÷ 8.9 so they sit on the same scale.

If you look up an older car, the card also places it against the latest NRCan year as a “if this exact efficiency showed up today” check. That is hypothetical — it is not a 2026 version of that car.

NRCan’s regular ratings file mixes gasoline cars with unlabeled hybrids (for example some Niro, Camry, RAV4, and Prius rows). We tag those as hybrid using the model name, known hybrid families, and a few generation rules so they are not crowned “best gasoline.”

By year lists

By year is fuel-only. IBC claims are omitted there because coverage is sparse by year and would look more precise than it is.

• Most efficient — lowest energy use among unique models that year, any powertrain.
• Best EV — battery-electric only.
• Best hybrid — non-plug hybrids and plug-in hybrids.
• Best gasoline — remaining combustion models, excluding diesel.
• Highest energy use — highest combined energy use.
• Lowest CO₂ — lowest tailpipe g/km among models with CO₂ above zero (pure EVs are left out of that list).

Top 20 pages use the same unique-model rule. Ties are possible when NRCan publishes the same combined figure for more than one name.

Yearly fuel cost

The dollar figure on a card is not from IBC or NRCan’s price tables. You set kilometres per year and pump or electricity prices. We multiply rated combined use by those assumptions. Plug-in hybrids use NRCan’s litres-equivalent combined figure. Defaults are recent Canadian average prices baked into the app; change them to match what you actually pay.

NHTSA 5-Star safety ratings

Car pages can show U.S. 5-Star ratings from NHTSA’s SaferCar file (New Car Assessment Program). Five is the strongest published result; one is the weakest. Overall is NHTSA’s combined crashworthiness score. Front is a head-on barrier test. Side covers being struck from the side, including a pole. Rollover is how easily the vehicle tips in a turn — not a roof-strength rating. Empty fields mean that test was not published for the matched U.S. row.

We match the same model year, make, and a cleaned model name to the U.S. vehicle NHTSA tested (for example CR-V SUV AWD). That is not this exact Canadian trim. If there is no row or no stars, we say we do not have the data. We never copy a previous year. These are U.S. lab tests, not Transport Canada, not IIHS, and not crash frequency on Canadian roads.

Source: NHTSA 5-Star Safety Ratings.

Charts

Charts count unique NRCan models per year, not every engine/trim line in the CSV. Maker lines show how large each brand’s rated catalog was. Powertrain mix uses the same hybrid/EV/gasoline tags as By year. Efficiency lines are medians. Class bars are the latest model year only.

Q&A

Q&A asks things the NRCan unique-model catalog can answer: did median energy use fall, did tailpipe CO₂ fall, did hybrid/EV share of nameplates rise, did SUV classes grow, did gasoline-only medians move. Same years as the Charts medians (usually 2015 vs the latest model year).

Guides

Longer explainers with links into the tools and the official sources: all guides, NRCan ratings, IBC claim indexes, efficiency lists by year.

What this is not

• Not an insurance quote, premium, or broker recommendation.
• Not EPA labels for the U.S. market (those can differ slightly from NRCan).
• Not a prediction of your real-world L/100 km or kWh/100 km.
• Not a Transport Canada or IIHS crash rating. NHTSA 5-Star is U.S. NCAP for a matched family in that year only, or we say we do not have the data.
• Not complete for every new model — both datasets lag, and some cars only appear in one source.