SUV's and pickup trucks give the driver the secure feeling of safety. Sadly, that feeling is largely an illusion. There are two main factors in safety, the first - the one everyone talks about - is how well a vehicle does in a collision. The second factor is how likely a vehicle is to get into an accident. People tacitly assume that all vehicles are equally likely to get into an accident, and that is simply not true. To see why imagine that you put a toy truck in your living room, it is fairly simple to see that the toy vehicle could maneuver around the room without hitting anything. Now let us replace the toy truck with a real truck and it should be obvious that it can't move without an accident. When you drive a larger vehicle, the size of the road doesn't change. The bigger the vehicle, the more likely - simply from size alone - that it is to be in an accident. There is another size related factor; in an accident a taller vehicle is more likely to roll over than a short one. While rollovers are involved in only about 4% of all traffic accidents, they are involved in about 85% of all traffic fatalities. Having a tall vehicle which is likely to roll over greatly increases the chance of your being killed in a traffic accident. But there is more than just size involved - a larger vehicle has more mass - it is harder to accelerate, slower to stop, and more difficult to turn. Thus a larger vehicle is less likely to be able to avoid an accident if the driver sees conditions building that are likely to cause one. In addition, a larger vehicle is designed to carry a heavier load than a small one and has to be designed to be stronger than a smaller vehicle. If you are like most people your reaction is probably: "Yes, that is exactly why I want a bigger vehicle." But there is another subtle illusion involved here: there is a difference between how well a vehicle survives an accident and how well the people inside the vehicle survive. In the 1930's vehicles were built STRONG, and if you wreck a vehicle from that period you would discover that the accident does little damage to the car. However your chance of surviving the wreck would be smaller than in a modern car. There are a number of reasons for this but one of the primary reasons is that a modern vehicle is designed to sacrifice itself to protect the people inside. I'll try to explain how that works. Let us imagine that we are driving at 35 miles an hour - in our strong 1930's car - and run into a concrete wall that brings the car to an instant stop. At the instant of the accident the car stops, BUT YOU CONTINUE MOVING until you are brought to a stop by hitting the interior of the car. It is this second collision which kills you. You go from 35 miles an hour to zero in a very short distance, and the forces upon you are enormous. It is as though you were thrown by a sling shot into a stationary steering wheel, windshield and dashboard. It ought to be clear to anyone that under such conditions having a big strong vehicle is utterly irrelevant; the important issue is how hard you hit the vehicle. Now let us look at a modern vehicle in the same collision. When a modern vehicle strikes the wall several things happen: the first is that impact sensors trigger the seat belts to start tightening and the air bag to be released, another thing that happens is that the front of the car starts to crumple instead of coming to a complete sudden stop. Instead of stopping your body instantly in the collision a modern vehicle gives you distance over which to come to a stop; greatly lowering the forces on your body and greatly increasing your chances of survival. Having a strong vehicle frame keeps this crumple action from happening. A head on collision with another vehicle like yours brings both of them to a stop just as though each of them had hit an unyielding concrete wall. "Ah ha", you say, "here is where a bigger vehicle is an advantage; it runs over the smaller car killing the other guy and leaving me alive". You are correct about that. Sadly the chances of killing the other person increase more than your chances of survival increase, so that there is a net loss to society in this case. The chances of a fatality in a collision go up if you are driving a truck or SUV. When you add in the facts that driving a large vehicle increases your chance of being in an accident in the first place, and that the taller vehicle increases your rollover chances, your overall chances of being killed in an accident are HIGHER in a truck or SUV than if you were driving a sedan. The bigger and stronger your vehicle is the greater your chances of being killed in it. One other factor influences the probability of an accident: vehicle reserve capacity. If you are driving a 140 mph car with 140 mph tires on it at 70 mph you are only operating the combination at 50% of its capacity; there is a lot of steering and braking ability left for an emergency. If you are driving a vehicle and set of tires at close to their maximum capability you have very little reserve left in case of an emergency; increasing your chance of an accident. A study of vehicle death rates will show that performance sedans have a lower chance of a fatal accident than non performance sedans which are solely designed to survive accidents. A performance vehicle is a double edged sword; if you drive a performance sedan hard you give up its safety margin and increase your chance of dying. Thus a performance sedan is only a good choice for those with the maturity to drive them sensibly, leaving their increased capability for emergencies. From a margin standpoint SUV's and trucks again do poorly in accident avoidance capability; an emergency at highway speeds in a truck or SUV leaves you with little breaking or handling capacity available in either the vehicle or the tires. In summation, the increased safety of an SUV or truck is largely an illusion, and a dangerous illusion at that. My suggestion is that you do yourself, and everyone else, a favor and abandon that illusion; chances are you'll live longer if you do.
My choice of vehicles saved my life on Dec 17, 2005. I was driving on the freeway at 70 mph ( the speed limit) when an 18 wheeler carrying a load of lumber, which had just passed me, dumped several 2 x 4's on the road in front of me. A 2 x 4 x 8'at 70 mph is a fatal impact; it will go through a windshield as though it weren't there. I was forced to do an emergency avoidance swerve to miss the flying 2 x 4's - which went by at head level. It was everything my performance sedan (an Infiniti G35 6MT) could do to avoid them. Had I been driving a less maneuverable vehicle to get the illusion of safety an SUV or a pickup truck provides, I would be dead. Of course no vehicle can protect you under all circumstances; but a performance sedan will generally improve your survival chances.