As I recall, the NTSB had about 100 reports of LongEZ or VariEZ accidents if you search by type. If you discounted the accidents where the aircraft landed in a car park or road the fatality rate was bad. Obviously some people will still make it. OK here goes:
from http://www.ntsb.gov/aviationquery/ :
LONGEZ 4/12
Long EZ 14/49
varieze 20/70
vari ez 2/8
40 fatal accidents of a total of 149. What I did in the past, but don’t have time to do now, is to read __all __ the summaries and look at the number of those accidents in which the aircraft happened to be in the circuit and land on a prepared runway, road etc… Or took off, had a power failure, landed then ran off the end of the available runway. Even the successful off-airport landings were generally on flat American cornfields and not on Welsh mountainsides. A lot of the nonfatal accidents were e.g. hand-starting aircraft running away, clipping wings on objects etc..
One thing that I may or may not have done (I don’t quite recall) was to count things like hitting trees after a power failure as an off-airport landing. Does it matter? Even here, you might expect to do better in a slower aircraft that lets you stall fully before hitting the canopy, or where you are more likely to find an usable landing area.
If you do an equivalent search for piper J3, about 54 of 449 of the accident reports record a fatality, and a higher proportion of these involved drink, drugs, suspected suicide, mountain flying etc. rather than engine-out scenarios. And I’d wager that the a lot of cub engine failures never get reported to the NTSB anyhow because no damage occurs and you can fly out with no fuss, after you’ve put some fuel in the tanks.
There are 4154 accidents for PA28s, of which 893 resulted in fatalities, so admittedly not a great deal worse than the EZs.
As ever, a high proportion of accidents in all types involved stupidity, low level aerobatics, tree-skimming, terrain in IMC etc. You can certainly improve your chances considerably simply by not being an idiot.
