Quote:
Originally Posted by some_other_dave
...Since I drive a 100 HP car that weighs 2000 lbs, you can probably see where my own choices lie.
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I think about this quite a bit, since 1/4 of my commute is on an undivided winding mountain road, sometimes in the rain or snow. About couple of years ago, as I was rounding a corner, a pickup in the inside upbound lanes started to go wide and into my lane. In my Saturn, I was able to go wide and easily recover. In my old F250, or even in my current Ranger, it's very likely that I would have ended up going sideways or upside-down through the guardrail and plummeting 1,000 feet down the side of the mountain.
Most of the accidents I've seen on that road are of the SUV-or-truck-lost-control type. Many of them are single-vehicle (or were precipitated by another vehicle that only lost a little paint on the bumper.) In the few head-on collisions I've seen, most resulted in deaths in both vehicles, and one involved the death of the driver of the SUV only, as the small car protected its occupants, but the SUV flipped onto its roof, crushing the driver. In a head-on collision at any appreciable speed (which the zomg-I-need-a-tank crowd cites as their excuse for bigger and bigger trucks), neither vehicle typically fares well.
I wish the Clunker (my regular commuter) was a newer car with airbags, ABS and improved crumple structure, but I sure wouldn't trade it for a top-heavy tail-light truck.