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June 18, 2003
Are Sport Utility Vehicles Safe?
As with many questions, the answer is it depends. See the numbers from the (US) National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, National Center for Statistics and Analysis here.
Physics can be your friend or your enemy. Compared to passenger cars, light trucks (which include SUVs) were 11.5 percent less likely to be involved in a fatality (47.4 percent versus 35.8). On the other hand, fatalities due to roll-overs were 15.7 percent for passenger cars vs. an average of 23.3 percent for light trucks. Thus, being in a light truck lowers the probability of fatality overall but dramatically increases the probability of fatality due to rollover.
In addition, light trucks are involved in injury crashes an average of 6.35 percent of the time versus 3.4 percent for passenger cars. Further, light trucks are involved in property damage only crashes on average of 1.65 percent of the time versus 0.9 percent for passenger cars.
But looking at the rates based on vehicle miles driven (which is one way of normalizing the data), fatalities in passenger cars are 1.73 versus 2.13 for light trucks (as compared to motorcycles are at 34.1). For the rate per 100,000 registered vehicles (another way of normalizing the data), the numbers are 21.31 for passenger cars and 26.23 for light trucks.
So, while overall there are fewer fatalities in light trucks, when you normalize the data, being in a light truck appears to be more dangerous. Some have theorized that this is caused by the higher rollover rates, which if true, indicates drivers of light trucks need to understand their vehicles have higher centers of gravity and therefore must be driven differently from passenger vehicles.
In either case, these are the numbers and I'm no expert so you decide. YMMV.
Sorry for the late posting yesterday but our Internet access was down. Really. Well, that's my story and I'm sticking to it.
Aloha!
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Comments
They (suv) are also relative more dangerous to pedestrians and other 'weak' trafic users. Too bad the injuries there are no broken down into light and serious (lasting damage).
Posted by: sjon at June 18, 2003 10:42 PM