NYT: Safety Gap Grows Wider Between S.U.V.s and Cars

[DeepModem Mom]

Safety Gap Grows Wider Between S.U.V.'s and Cars
By DANNY HAKIM

Published: August 17, 2004


DETROIT, Aug. 16 - The gap in safety between sport utility vehicles and passenger cars last year was the widest yet recorded, according to new federal traffic data.

People driving or riding in a sport utility vehicle in 2003 were nearly 11 percent more likely to die in an accident than people in cars, the figures show. The government began keeping detailed statistics on the safety of vehicle categories in 1994.

S.U.V.'s continue to gain in popularity, despite safety concerns and the vehicles' lagging fuel economy at a time when gasoline prices are high. For the first seven months of 2004, S.U.V.'s accounted for 27.2 percent of all light-duty vehicle sales, up from 26 percent in the period a year earlier, according to Ward's AutoInfoBank. However, sales growth for the largest sport utility vehicles has stalled lately, while small and medium-size S.U.V.'s, engineered more like cars than pickup trucks, continue to make rapid gains.

New figures from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration shed light on how wide the differences in safety can be from one vehicle to another in the S.U.V. category, which now encompasses scores of models. For example, a few newer S.U.V. models appear to have a sharply lower risk of rolling over in an accident than other models.

Over all, crash fatalities declined across the board in 2003 to the lowest levels in six years, the government figures show, with 42,643 people killed in traffic accidents in the United States. Much of the decline appeared to come from fewer people driving drunk and more people buckling up. But the United States has not made as much progress as some other developed nations, because rates of seat belt use remain lower here and because of the growing numbers of S.U.V.'s and pickup trucks, which tend to pose greater hazards than cars both to their occupants and to others on the road....


http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/17/business/17auto.html

[LizW]

1. And yet if you ask anyone who drives one of the things

why they drive such a huge expensive gas guzzler, they will say it is because it is safer than a car. :eyes:

This is the kind of information Bushco is trying to prevent from being reported in the future because it "hurts manufacturers."

[JLuckey]

2. In all fairness......

I live at the bottom of a steep hill in a northern climate. 3ft. of snow last winter. I could not survive here without my 4x4.

[DeepModem Mom]

3. Confession time for DMM -- we drive SUVs..

in a snowy clime, and have filled them to capacity with people, pets, and shite many times. We need just one car, as are part-time in the location, and it's my choice -- hubby would as soon have a small, sporty car. I worry about safety, and gas-guzzling, and embarrassment -- and am considering smaller when we replace current model. Have to admit, though, I love driving the big evil behemoth --

[leesa]

4. It's truly amazing how we all survived without them for so many years

I love apologists for SUVs and giant trucks. I'm wondering how people are going to unload all these dinosaurs since the tax perk that people bought them for will no longer be there when they are used.

[spinbaby]

5. There IS a place for SUVs and big trucks

I would never criticize a country dweller in snow country who owns an SUV or a pickup, but feel free to belittle urbanites who feel it necessary to own a vehicle that can climb mountains and plow through snow drifts.

[LizW]

6. Agreed

It's just that where I live (a suburb of a southern city where it rarely snows) SUVs are everywhere, the bigger the better. They are definitely a status vehicle here. Not that there's anything wrong with that if that's how people want to spend their money. But I do roll my eyes when people say they drive them because of safety. I've seen too many of them flipped on the Interstates.

[kysrsoze]

7. Some people do have a legitimate need for an SUV

If you live around snow or have to haul things, you sometimes need a truck. I don't even mind people driving Pathfinders or 4Runners around a city. What bothers me is the number of people in big cities and suburbs who drive Hummers, Escalades, Expeditions and Excursions. It's ridiculous. They're difficult to park and hard to get around in, but people drive them anyway. I'm amazed at how many of them I see with one petite woman sitting inside. No kids. No payload. My friend saw a small woman in an expedition yakking on the cellphone and wearing a fur coat.

[Doctor Smith]

14. I live in the mountains, where there is significant snow fall.

I have driven Subarus and Audis, and have never had a problem in the snow. I have seen many SUV accidents, a significant number of which were fatal. SUVs seems to have an affinity for ditches, and almost always land with the wheels up.

[Logansquare]

15. I hear that Subarus are the vehicle of choice in Alaska

SUVs are just expensive sleds when ice and snow hit.

[treepig]

8. BIG AND BAD; How the S.U.V. ran over automotive safety.

The New Yorker

January 12, 2004

SECTION: FACT; Commerce & Culture; Pg. 28


In the history of the automotive industry, few things have been quite as unexpected as the rise of the S.U.V. Detroit is a town of engineers, and engineers like to believe that there is some connection between the success of a vehicle and its technical merits. But the S.U.V. boom was like Apple's bringing back the Macintosh, dressing it up in colorful plastic, and suddenly creating a new market. It made no sense to them. Consumers said they liked four-wheel drive. But the overwhelming majority of consumers don't need four-wheel drive. S.U.V. buyers said they liked the elevated driving position. But when, in focus groups, industry marketers probed further, they heard things that left them rolling their eyes. As Keith Bradsher writes in "High and Mighty"-perhaps the most important book about Detroit since Ralph Nader's "Unsafe at Any Speed"-what consumers said was "If the vehicle is up high, it's easier to see if something is hiding underneath or lurking behind it." Bradsher brilliantly captures the mixture of bafflement and contempt that many auto executives feel toward the customers who buy their S.U.V.s. Fred J. Schaafsma, a top engineer for General Motors, says, "Sport-utility owners tend to be more like 'I wonder how people view me,' and are more willing to trade off flexibility or functionality to get that." According to Bradsher, internal industry market research concluded that S.U.V.s tend to be bought by people who are insecure, vain, self-centered, and self-absorbed, who are frequently nervous about their marriages, and who lack confidence in their driving skills. Ford's S.U.V. designers took their cues from seeing "fashionably dressed women wearing hiking boots or even work boots while walking through expensive malls." Toyota's top marketing executive in the United States, Bradsher writes, loves to tell the story of how at a focus group in Los Angeles "an elegant woman in the group said that she needed her full-sized Lexus LX 470 to drive up over the curb and onto lawns to park at large parties in Beverly Hills." One of Ford's senior marketing executives was even blunter: "The only time those S.U.V.s are going to be off-road is when they miss the driveway at 3 a.m."

Consider the set of safety statistics compiled by Tom Wenzel, a scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, in California, and Marc Ross, a physicist at the University of Michigan. The numbers are expressed in fatalities per million cars, both for drivers of particular models and for the drivers of the cars they hit. (For example, in the first case, for every million Toyota Avalons on the road, forty Avalon drivers die in car accidents every year, and twenty people die in accidents involving Toyota Avalons.) The numbers below have been rounded:

Make / Model Type Driver Deaths Other Deaths Total

Toyota Avalon large 40 20 60

Chrysler Town & Country minivan 31 36 67

Toyota Camry mid-size 41 29 70

Volkswagen Jetta subcompact 47 23 70

Ford Windstar minivan 37 35 72

Nissan Maxima mid-size 53 26 79

Honda Accord mid-size 54 27 82

Chevrolet Venture minivan 51 34 85

Buick Century mid-size 70 23 93

Subaru Legacy/Outback compact 74 24 98

Mazda 626 compact 70 29 99

Chevrolet Malibu mid-size 71 34 105

Chevrolet Suburban S.U.V. 46 59 105

Jeep Grand Cherokee S.U.V. 61 44 106

Honda Civic subcompact 84 25 109

Toyota Corolla subcompact 81 29 110

Ford Expedition S.U.V. 55 57 112

GMC Jimmy S.U.V. 76 39 114

Ford Taurus mid-size 78 39 117

Nissan Altima compact 72 49 121

Mercury Marquis large 80 43 123

Nissan Sentra subcompact 95 34 129

Toyota 4Runner S.U.V. 94 43 137

Chevrolet Tahoe S.U.V. 68 74 141

Dodge Stratus mid-size 103 40 143

Lincoln Town Car large 100 47 147

Ford Explorer S.U.V. 88 60 148

Pontiac Grand Am compact 118 39 157

Toyota Tacoma pickup 111 59 171

Chevrolet Cavalier subcompact 146 41 186

Dodge Neon subcompact 161 39 199

Pontiac Sunfire subcompact 158 44 202

Ford F-Series pickup 110 128 238

Are the best performers the biggest and heaviest vehicles on the road? Not at all. Among the safest cars are the midsize imports, like the Toyota Camry and the Honda Accord. Or consider the extraordinary performance of some subcompacts, like the Volkswagen Jetta. Drivers of the tiny Jetta die at a rate of just forty-seven per million, which is in the same range as drivers of the five-thousand-pound Chevrolet Suburban and almost half that of popular S.U.V. models like the Ford Explorer or the GMC Jimmy. In a head-on crash, an Explorer or a Suburban would crush a Jetta or a Camry. But, clearly, the drivers of Camrys and Jettas are finding a way to avoid head-on crashes with Explorers and Suburbans. The benefits of being nimble-of being in an automobile that's capable of staying out of trouble-are in many cases greater than the benefits of being big.

[TahitiNut]

9. It looks to me like VISIBILITY is an issue.

Of the vehicles in that list I have some experience with, the ones with the greatest all-around visibility seem to be consistently lower in the fatalities. The Pontiac Sunfire, for example, has lousy all-around visibility, as does the Lincoln Town Car. (Ford products are, in my experience, consistently terrible for visibility.) The Town&Country/Caravan/Voyager, on the other hand has excellent visibility. I'm a stickler for this when I buy a car. I require the larger "European" outside rear-view mirrors and eschew the 5 o'clock and 7 o'clock blind spots, typical of the rear pillar roof lines. (When "little people" drive the metal behemoths, I don't think they can see much. A cell phone can cut that by 40%.)

[treepig]

10. unfortunately, i can't find an online version of the article

but they make exactly the point that you do about visibility:

The truth, underneath all the rationalizations, seemed to be that S.U.V. buyers thought of big, heavy vehicles as safe: they found comfort in being surrounded by so much rubber and steel. To the engineers, of course, that didn't make any sense, either: if consumers really wanted something that was big and heavy and comforting, they ought to buy minivans, since minivans, with their unit-body construction, do much better in accidents than S.U.V.s. (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.) But this desire for safety wasn't a rational calculation. It was a feeling. Over the past decade, a number of major automakers in America have relied on the services of a French-born cultural anthropologist, G. Clotaire Rapaille, whose speciality is getting beyond the rational-what he calls "cortex"-impressions of consumers and tapping into their deeper, "reptilian" responses. And what Rapaille concluded from countless, intensive sessions with car buyers was that when S.U.V. buyers thought about safety they were thinking about something that reached into their deepest unconscious. "The No. 1 feeling is that everything surrounding you should be round and soft, and should give," Rapaille told me. "There should be air bags everywhere. Then there's this notion that you need to be up high. That's a contradiction, because the people who buy these S.U.V.s know at the cortex level that if you are high there is more chance of a rollover. But at the reptilian level they think that if I am bigger and taller I'm safer. You feel secure because you are higher and dominate and look down. That you can look down is psychologically a very powerful notion. And what was the key element of safety when you were a child? It was that your mother fed you, and there was warm liquid. That's why cupholders are absolutely crucial for safety. If there is a car that has no cupholder, it is not safe. If I can put my coffee there, if I can have my food, if everything is round, if it's soft, and if I'm high, then I feel safe. It's amazing that intelligent, educated women will look at a car and the first thing they will look at is how many cupholders it has." During the design of Chrysler's PT Cruiser, one of the things Rapaille learned was that car buyers felt unsafe when they thought that an outsider could easily see inside their vehicles. So Chrysler made the back window of the PT Cruiser smaller. Of course, making windows smaller-and thereby reducing visibility-makes driving more dangerous, not less so. But that's the puzzle of what has happened to the automobile world: feeling safe has become more important than actually being safe.

[LittleApple81]

11. THANKS FOR POSTING THIS. I quoted it to a DUer and could not

find the text. Do you have a link? I am copying this piece just in case. It was such a good article. Thanks again!

[treepig]

12. i pulled it up through lexis nexis

don't know if the original new yorker article is on-line (i couldn't find it at the site, but others might be more successful).

if you want the full text, send me a private mail and i'll cut and paste it for you.

[DeepModem Mom]

13. Here's another recent NYT article, about rollover rates --

U.S. Regulators Release Vehicle Rollover Data
By DANNY HAKIM

Published: August 10, 2004

For the first time, federal regulators released figures yesterday that show how prone individual models of new cars and light-duty trucks are to roll over in an accident, exposing the occupants to high risk of death or serious injury.

Instead of merely assigning a star rating to each model it tests, as it has done in the past, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration released figures that allow consumers to compare rollover risk model by model. The star system, which is continuing, has been criticized for not providing enough information to distinguish among vehicles, because nearly all received three or four stars.

Of the 68 models the agency tested for the 2004 model year, the Ford Explorer Sport Trac, a cross between a pickup and a sport utility vehicle, was found to have the highest rollover risk. The agency's tests indicated a 35 percent chance of rolling over during a single-vehicle accident.

That is more than four times the risk of the best performer in this year's tests, a four-door Mazda RX-8 sedan, which was about 8 percent, the agency said. Mazda is an affiliate of the Ford Motor Company, which makes the Explorer.

As expected, cars performed much better than S.U.V.'s or pickup trucks in the tests, because cars are not as tall and generally ride closer to the ground, making them more stable. But the new ratings also show wide differences among vehicles of the same type....

NOTE: "The new rollover rankings, along with front and side impact test ratings, are available at the safety agency's Web site, www.safercar.gov."

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/10/business/10auto.html

[Thor_MN]

16. Why can't they mandate a standard bumper height???

I believe that much of difference is in cars "nose diving" under the much higher bumper of SUVs. Can't they just pick a middle height and require that some amount of solid bumper must be within that height range?

And while they are at it, pick a side for the gas tank and STICK with it!!!