Big, Bad Brutes?
The latest assault on SUVs: They are a danger to smaller vehicles
Late last year, government safety testers smashed two SUVs into the sides of Honda Accords at about 40 miles per hour. First was a 1997 GMC Jimmy, which "injured" the dummy driver but didn't "kill" it. A 2002 Chevrolet TrailBlazer, the Jimmy's descendant, was much more lethal: The dummy "was dead three times over," says one safety expert familiar with the results.
The tests give SUV haters one more piece of ammunition in their battle against the controversial vehicles--and sport-utility owners another reason to rally around their beloved status symbols. SUVs have long come under fire for their height and girth, which can intimidate drivers of smaller vehicles and which also make SUVs three times more likely than cars to roll over. Now safety advocates are taking aim at another SUV trait: their tendency to do disproportionate damage to smaller vehicles. Among crashes in which an SUV strikes a car, there are 16 times as many driver fatalities in the cars as in the SUVs. "The auto industry has paid too little attention to the safety of other motorists," David Pittle of the public-interest group Consumers Union told a Senate panel last week.
Detroit has devoted lots of attention, however, to SUV owners, who provide a huge chunk of the industry's profits. As SUVs have evolved from retrofitted pickup trucks into highly popular vehicles with their own unique designs, manufacturers have made them higher and larger and in some cases stiffer. SUVs are now virtually as safe as cars, with 16.25 fatalities per 100,000 registered vehicles in 2001.
Aggressive drivers. Trouble is, what's good for the high-riding occupant is often bad for the person below him. The 2002 TrailBlazer that killed the dummy in the Honda Accord, for example, is stiffer than the '97 Jimmy that spared the dummy. That helps it score better in crash tests conducted by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, a nonprofit group funded by insurers. But the additional stiffness also makes the SUV potentially more dangerous to other cars. SUVs are inherently "aggressive," as safety experts put it, for reasons that are obvious to anybody who drives a compact car in an SUV world: Light trucks (which include SUVs) sometimes sail right over the chassis of smaller vehicles and tear into the passenger compartment. An even stiffer vehicle is less likely to crumple in a crash and more likely to penetrate the other vehicle, especially if it "overrides" its doors or bumpers.
Such "compatibility" problems have existed for decades--pickup trucks, popular since the 1960s, may pose even more dangers to ordinary cars than SUVs do--and safety experts have been studying the SUV issue for at least five years. But attention has intensified as light trucks have come to represent half of all new-vehicles sales. "The fleet is becoming more mismatched," says Brian O'Neill, president of the insurance group. A 1998 study estimated that the shift away from cars in favor of SUVs has caused about 2,000 additional deaths per year, and Rae Tyson, an NHTSA spokesman, says, "I'm sure that number is much higher now."
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