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Keep in mind that MOST collisions are SINGLE car. You lose control of the car and hit the curb, or a tree, or slide off the road. In all those situations, a lighter car will always stop quicker, and hit with less energy than a heavier car.
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my first car was an opel corsa like in this first video mine was a purple 2 door variant with seatbelt tentioners but no airbags.
http://ecomodder.com/forum/showthrea...html#post57746
after two months of driveing a combination of a wet worn roadsurface on wich watter pooled, a steep curve, bad car handling, a speed that was likely to fast for the circomstances and my inexperience (two months driveing) led to the car oversteering into a concrete darrier at about 70 km/h (43mph)
fortunatly for me i was starting to regain controle so i didn't hit the wall full frontal but glanced off it... the impact looked a bit like that video though. the front corner of the car looked competely gone and a wheel was torn off.
i walked away without a scratch, the car was totalled and the woodwork in front of the wall was all over the place.
when i went to the owner of the propperty later to pay for the damage, he tolled me i was the third person to crash into that wall. this was somehow reassuring that it wasn't completely my fault and that it was just a plain dangerous spot. all in all i was very lucky...but it showed me how quickly things can go wrong
so would i have been better off in a heavier vehicle? it might not have bounced off the wall but rather crushed into it along with me.
lets just say i'm not to compelled to get a corsa again, but my girlfriend has a ford fiesta wich is just the same size... it handles far better than the corsa and i don't mind borrowing it sometimes. in this case better handling would hanve been better than bigger
my next car was a 1987 kadett wich was slightly bigger but techically not much safer it was guite a light car... i almost got toalled when a student driver in a big brand new volvo made an illegal left turn just in front of me and all i could do was slam the brakes. when a got out there was more than a meter between the vehicles so i'd bounced off the volvo. a shorter stopping distance might have avoided the accident although i didn manage to slow down enough to prevent worse... good breaks and a short stopping distance are very important!
what i've learend from all this is that the way a car handles and the way it can be stopped are quite important when things go wrong.
i've also learend that most accidents seem to happen when people, often inexperienced misjuge a situation.
i've also learend that the faster you go the bigger the mess..
jugeing by where everything that wasn't attached to the car (like my glasses) went i'd say seatbelts are one of the best safety features in any car
driveing IS dangerous so all you can do is try to be carefull...