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Old 02-15-2012, 09:29 PM   #55 (permalink)
niky
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Size and weight figures never tell the whole story. You also have to look at how this cross-references to buying demographic. Older drivers, younger drivers... cheap drivers who don't want to spend much on safety items like good tires...

I think this note from the NHTSA pdf is telling:

Quote:
...the fact that, even after controlling for things like driver age and gender, there are important other confounding variables that covarywith size and weight and have their own separate effects on injury risk...
In general, the lack of safety of smaller vehicles is only partially linked to size, but also linked greatly to how well they handle and brake.

Smaller vehicles, in order to be accepted by the American public, need to be cheaper. Which means poorer tires, braking and safety equipment than you would likely see in the European or Japanese market, which are used to buying high content small cars for more money.

Also telling is the graph on collision claim frequencies. Note graph on page 19. Who have the lowest? Large cars and station wagons... bought by older, more mature drivers... and two-door micro-cars, bought by your typical urbanite (often women) and driven slowly. Smaller four-door and two-door cars, driven mostly by young males, have the highest incidences. This will affect average crash speed and chances of death.

Then you have graphs which have a huge variance in driver deaths for certain segments (small SUVs and medium SUVs in the mid-90s), which indicate model specific issues... it's likely the medium SUV variance is due to the Explorer.

A driver death variance of less than fifty deaths per million doesn't tell you all that much unless controlled for demographics, collision speed and model type. And even then, newer small cars are getting much safer, as the data shows. And as stated, as more people embrace smaller cars, they will get much better.

Undoubtedly, very little weight is bad if very little of it is spent on crash structure. But go upscale in price on small cars, and you can get much better crash structures within the same volume and weight thanks to stronger materials (ala SMART or MINI).
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