The myth of SUV Safety

Which do you think is safer in an accident: a mini or a ford F-150? Take a look at this photo and then see if you change your mind. Malcolm Gladwell had a great article in the New Yorker on the myth of SUV safety. Amongst the gems:

• Most SUVs are built to the truck standards to avoid the Fuel Mileage / Safety requirements for cars. To wit:

  In a thirty-five-m.p.h. crash test, for instance, the driver of a Cadillac Escalade--the G.M. counterpart to the Lincoln Navigator--has a sixteen-per-cent chance of a life-threatening head injury, a twenty-per-cent chance of a life-threatening chest injury, and a thirty-five-per-cent chance of a leg injury. The same numbers in a Ford Windstar minivan--a vehicle engineered from the ground up, as opposed to simply being bolted onto a pickup-truck frame--are, respectively, two per cent, four per cent, and one per cent.

• SUVs are built heavy (really heavy) because bigger is better. But you much more likely to need it because the accident avoidance characteristics are much worse
• People buy cars they think are safe (high off the ground, big, with small windows that people can't see into) rather than are actually safe (low roll over characteristics, good visibility).

Frontline also had a great program on this topic: rollover: the hidden history of the SUV which describes the lengths Ford did not go to to make the Bronco II and then the Ford Explorer rollover safe despite massive evidence to the contrary. The NHTSB also basically did nothing for ten years. It's a searing indictment of the abuse of the gub'ment.