USA Today automotive columnist Jame Healey sees dead people. "If the switch to smaller, lighter vehicles continues to grow, the result could be anywhere from dozens to thousands of traffic deaths that would have been avoided in bigger vehicles, according to fatality records and safety forecasters." It's an old argument (which doesn't necessarily make it a bad one), for which Healey trots out some old stats: a 2002 National Academy of Sciences' report that concludes "Small vehicles have higher fatality rates than larger ones." It's just the first salvo in a sustained stat campaign that, strangely, fights both sides of the argument at once. Or, if you prefer, takes a fair and balanced view. In the middle of the piece, a University of Michigan physics professor nails it. There are "lots of answers" to the question of small-car safety, Marc Ross opines. "There just aren't any simple ones." Perhaps that explains the discrepancy between Healey's sensationalistic opening and yet another wishy-washy USA Today headline: "People buy small cars even though they can be deadly."
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Did you read the rest of USA Today? There were these headlines as well:
– “Gravity still in effect”
– “Sun rose today”, and
– “Idiots get their auto news from USA Today”
As the recent Chinese car and SUV crash tests have shown, safety is mostly a problem of engineering, not mass. Very lightweight cars can afford to have more of their structure devoted solely to crash safety than heavy ones and still achieve higher efficiency.
Second, if the switch to smaller, lighter vehicles continues, then more cars on the road will be smaller and lighter, and safety should be improved. The problem is that there are a lot of SUVs on the road that tend to stomp Golf-size cars flat in a collision.
Safe cars have been engineered to be the safest they can be considering their big disadvantage in mass and how lower they sit on the road. SUVs sat on their laurels b/c they where heavier and higher and touted how much better you were in a SUV / small car collision – where the SUV had a mass advantage. What was often ignored by the SUV lover blowhards were how fatal accidents were in SUV / SUV crashes where that advantage of mass was negated or single SUV incidents where they flipped over and crushed the occupants where a small car would have not done so.
SUV safety was not a major concern b/c the MFGRs sat on the laurels of mass (and often the ladder frame) will protect you and not engineering the vehicle for better stability or adding in the advanced crash safety structure smaller cars used.
Healey has one thing right…smaller cars with less mass are at a disadvantage to bigger more massive vehicles that sit higher. However this is only b/c of the plethora of these gas guzzlers on the road. His argument will become less of a concern as gas prices remain high and people flock to smaller more efficient cars and trade in their 6000lb single passenger suvs for smaller more efficient vehicles.
I completely concur with both arguments above.
European and japanese road fatalities (per km driven)are currently much lower than American ones, and both areas have a high proportion of small cars. Of course, there are numerous other factors, but it seems that if small cars were as “deadly” as USA today paints them, the trend would be different.
Heck, there are 14 gazillion airbags in my golf, and a body structure that protects the cabin in case of frontal shocks, as well as very good headrests against whiplashs. I’m just not so sure about side impacts.
What is also forgotten / ignored by these arguments “proving” big = safe is that for the other people on the road in moderate to small non-frame construction vehicles, being hit BY these “safer” SUV’s is more likely to result in injury and death.
In other words, it’s selfish interests that moves some people to massive vehicles, and in doing so, they add to the risk of others.
If people used vehicles of appropriate size for their true needs (and bling is not “verbotten” in smaller vehicles), and a majority of people used such vehicles, the death rate for EVERYONE drops as clearly can be seen in stats from other nations.
Not forgetting that other nations have smaller roads and more traffic congestion as a rule, which in effect, should raise their death rates – but clearly do not.
Of course, some of this is competence in driving resulting from stringient driver education and testing, but that’s a discussion for another day.
This is a specious argument. The average size of cars in Europe is far smaller than the US equivalent – yet Europe does not have a higher incidence of traffic fatalities.
Quite simple to work around this by working with speed limits, traffic regulations and an expected reduction in the number of huge cars as consumers turn away from them in droves (already happening.)
I’m heartened to see that even the demographic that comments within the linked article isn’t buying this argument anymore.
I’m sure the damage is done by just the headline alone, which will echo around and inform the “Conventional Wisdom” and make that many more people go in for the S.U.V they may have been waffling about, especially during lulls in the gas price increase trend.
The fearmongering is really disgusting.
So… a couple of months after the Governor of New Jersey, riding in a Suburban driven by a trained policeman, gets seriously injured when his truck goes out of control after being hit by another truck that went out of control trying to avoid a third truck that went out of control trying to avoid the Governor’s truck, we get informed that “bigger vehicles are safer”. Yeah, thanks for that nugget.
Precisely, gzuckier. The mind control program must be re-established in the wake of unforseen events.
SUV’s are bad for the environment. Small cars will kill you. Onward ho to mid-sized car blandness and CUV hell!
My wife got rear-ended at 50 mph by a moron driving a Ford Excursion; he was turned around trying to deal with his kids, in the back seat. She was stopped in a left-turn lane, waiting to make that turn. She was driving a Boxster. Yes, a Boxster. She was home after a couple of hours in the ER and in Africa lugging around 80-pound chimpanzees a month later. (Don’t ask…) That “small car” did the job it was well-designed to do. We bought another one five days later.
Ouch, out of curiosity how did the driver in the Excursion fare?
He and the kids were fine, same for the two people in the Outback sitting in front of Susan, into whom she got ricocheted. She had eight fractured ribs, but because she’s an athlete and in outstanding condition, that turned out to be no big deal. (Easy for me to say…) Also some stitches and a moderate concussion from whacking her head on the roll hoop. But the Porsche collapsed just as it was designed to.
Interesting thing was, we didn’t make much off the inevitable lawsuit. $35,000, I think it was. The lawyer said, “You can go to bed, pull the sheets over your head and stay in the dark moaning for six months and we’ll sue their asses off. Or you can simply get on with your life and not make as much as you deserve off it.” She of course chose the latter.
Excursion driver also did NOT get a ticket. Turns out that in NY, a cop has to actually witness an infraction to give a ticket. That or get multiple affadavits from witnesses (of which there were a number). Cop didn’t want to do the paperwork.
USA Today headline: “People buy small cars even though they can be deadly.”
Gotta love that.
Earlier this summer, we took my in-laws for a ride in my ’06 Civic (to go walk on a rails-to-trails pathway).
My retired father in-law was in the front passenger seat. Looking out of the windshield and not seeing the Civic’s hood at all, he commented: “Can you see the hood of the car?” “No,” I replied, not even if I try.
When I told him despite that fact (that you can’t see the quickly-sloping hood), the car has a five-star frontal crash rating, he replied: “That’s hard to believe.”
He much prefers the comfort level that overlooking the long hood of his Chevy Impala provides.
Such perceptions are old school, I feel.
Does anyone every factor in the fact that smaller, lighter cars are easier to maneuver? I wonder if smaller cars have lower rates of getting into accidents in the first place.
In Europe safety translates into vehicle advancements that improve turning and stopping power in order to avoid accidents. Here people figure they are too dumb to avoid accidents and bigger and better is the answer.
This is yet another excuse to justify the increasingly socially unfashionable ownership of SUVs. You can add it to the existing collection of excuses such as “I need a vehicle that can tow” and “We need the room for junior and the dog” and “We need it to go camping/surfing/diving”.
Habits are hard to break and a lot of Americans love their SUVs and will continue to justify their ownership until it hits their back pocket harder.
The car size saftey argument is badly flawed. The biggest variable in car safety is the driver. Young males are more dangerous drivers than older more female drivers.
Because vehicles are marketed affectively different types of vehicles are driven by different types of people, which overwhelms the effect of purely physical vehicle characteristics in evaluating vehicle safety.
For example compare the accident and fatality rates for pick-ups, SUVs, and full sized vans. These vehicles are all built on the same chassis, yet the pick up trucks are much more likely to be in accidents. The full size vans, which are a favorite of the blue hair set, or are more likely to be driven by men-at-work, are least likely to be in trouble.
My guess is that the optimum car from a safety perspective is a big sedan (e.g. Mercedes S). Enough metal to take a punch, but much less likely to roll or lose control than a SUV.
SUVs provide lots of mass, but their handling and driving characteristics are so bad that the only reason they don’t produce more fatalities is because so many of them are driven by middle age women who drive slowly and cautiously.
As a sidebar…what will happen when the affluent first-owners buyers sell their SUVs to buy smaller more efficient cars, and the less affluent buy the 3rd or 4th hand 6000lb grenade, now with bad brakes non-matching tires and no service? That thought is frightening me a tad…
Life is complicated. There was a piece in the Wall Street Journal this morning about how when an inefficient, energy-consumptive, ecologically unsound facility (a coal-fired plant, an ancient steel mill, etc.) is superseded with something efficient and green, the old one is sold to Peru, India, Brazil or Poland at a dime on the dollar and put back to work there. Same with cars, in fact.
I have to agree with Stephan’s assessment – but the thing is, we Americans “learned” the hard way that we could manage fine with far smaller vehicles after the 1973 oil crisis, started to forget, got slapped in the face with a wet fish again in 1979, started to forget and got whacked again in 1990, started to forget, got hit by a hurricaine and $3.66 a gallon gas in 2005 (wasn’t it?) – so now are we starting to LEARN yet?
The point is, we needn’t have forgotten after learning the first time in 1973, but that is what humanity is. Not just we Americans. All of us.
There aren’t any easy answers.
But I for one have been saying since 1974 – when I first started to drive – doesn’t take a brain surgeon to figure out that we should drive what we need (in mass and size) compared to what we want “just because.”
Doesn’t mean to say cars have to be boring. Or even tiny.
Just think outside the (SUV) box, for one thing.
We just got a small pop-up camper. We therefore could not use our Prius, but we do have a 2nd car we drive about 6000 miles a year on. So we looked at the most economical car that could reasonably tow the pop-up. It ended up to be a 2007 Hyundai Sonata four cylinder.
When pulling out of the camp ground on the pop-up’s maiden run 8 days ago, surrounded by huge trucks and SUVs, massive pop-ups, massive trailers and huge motor homes, we got the funniest look from this one dude. Like we were from planet Xylaphone, or something.
We just chose as much as we needed and wanted, and went with it. Same thing for cars.
Hopefully in two years, we can buy a hybrid replacement when the lease runs out, or maybe a clean diesel, or something. Don’t want an SUV! Not even a clean diesel one.
I have always driven small cars. I don’t particularly like them, but 12MPG is not college commuter friendly. I have had nearly all of my friends and family comment on how each of my compact cars are “death traps” and the like. I never had a wreck in any the bad enough to prove or disprove this theory, but they seemed safe enough to me. I wasn’t nervous when in traffic around SUVs, but I had a few careless truck drivers scare me pretty bad.
It’s ironic that the Jetta pictured really isn’t a small car anymore. It weighs over 3200 pounds (close to a Camry) and gives up only about an inch in overall width. The only dimension in which it’s smaller than the Camry is in overall length: 10 inches shorter.
Great first post, Sherborn Sean!
The more similar in size the collection of vehicles on the road is, the safer everyone is. Well, except those that gave up their SUVs. They’ll have to suffer the same injuries as the people they hit instead of just killing them and walking away.