https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/larger-vehicles-may-make-canadians-feel-safe-on-the-road-but-heavier-cars-are-proven-to-cause-more-fatal-collisions
[Of course, driving a vehicle with 4-6 times the mass of a small car,
also means using 4-6 times as much energy to accelerate the vehicle, and
as the big vehicles are typically powered with fossil fuels, 4-6 times
the climate change impact.]
Big cars kill: 'Monster' vehicles may make Canadians feel safer, but
they're more likely to cause fatal collisions
For every 450 kilograms added to the weight of a car, a vehicle becomes
40 per cent more likely to turn an otherwise survivable crash into a
fatal collision
Tristin Hopper
July 31, 2015 12:46 PM EDT
Michelle Taylor’s last words, before she was crushed to death by a truck
tire, were, “What does this idiot think he’s doing?”
With her 83-year-mother in the passenger seat, the 53-year-old high
school teacher was driving along Ontario’s Highway 9 in a Buick Regal
when a truck started to drift over from the opposing lane.
The vehicle was a burgundy Ford pickup customized with off-road tires
and an aftermarket “lift kit.” And at the wheel was a teenager who had
fallen asleep.
In the split second before impact, Taylor slowed almost to a stop and
pulled as far off the shoulder as she could. The first thing the truck’s
bumper would have hit was the Buick’s hood.
“The thing just rolled right up and into the cab and crushed her,” says
her husband, James Taylor. “On the positive side, it was instant death
for my wife.”
The driver of the truck emerged virtually unscathed. A month after the
collision, he posted “miss you” on a Facebook photo of a large truck
that was presumably the vehicle involved in the crash. Just this year,
he was proudly posting photos of his newest rig: a GMC Denali with
custom front bumper, off-road tires and, once again, a lift kit.
“From the dad’s perspective, it was the smartest thing he could have
done,” says Taylor of the parental decision to equip a teenager with a
“monster truck.”
“’I have an irresponsible young lad who’s wanting to drive, I’m going to
give him the biggest possible thing on the road so he doesn’t get hurt,’
and sure enough, he never got hurt.’”
Big cars kill. They kill because their bumpers don’t line up with sedans
and station wagons. They kill because they have stiff frames and they
kill because they’re heavier. For every 450 kilograms added to the
weight of a car (roughly the difference between a Toyota Prius and a
Ford Taurus), a vehicle becomes 40 per cent more likely to turn an
otherwise survivable crash into a fatal collision.
Canadians like big cars because they keep their occupants alive and,
thanks to a new era of low gas prices, they’re buying them in record
numbers. In the first half of 2015, pickup trucks claimed the first,
second and fourth spots for best-selling vehicles in Canada.
Since Jan. 1, 58,318 Ford F-series pickups and 47,000 Ram pickups have
been sold in Canada. In a distant third place is the Honda Civic, with
30,000.
The trade-off, played out on Canadian roads every day, is that these
cars are dramatically increasing the chance of killing everybody else.
“For every pickup truck driver killed in a side impact, 25 were killed
in a car,” says Clay Gabler, a U.S.-based “crash compatibility” pioneer.
For years, automobile safety researchers had focused mostly on which
vehicles were best at keeping their occupants alive.
“I thought, what if we turned this on its head and found the most lethal
vehicles out there?” says Gabler by phone from his office at Virginia Tech.
His finding, first published as the SUV trend was picking up steam, was
that American roads were packed with cars “not designed to play nicely
with each other.”
In just one of the years studied, 1997, 5,373 Americans were killed in a
crash between a van or truck. Of those, an incredible 81 per cent had
been car passengers.
Not only were the trucks and vans significantly heavier, their higher
“ride height” was causing them to shred through passenger compartments,
unhindered by barriers such as bumpers or door sills.
In the years since, new research has only bolstered the findings.
At the University of Buffalo, medical researchers found when an SUV hits
a car, even if the car has a better crash test rating, its driver was
still four times more likely to wind up dead in the collision.
“In frontal crashes, SUVs tend to ride over shorter passenger vehicles …
crushing the occupant of the passenger car,” said study author Dietrich
Jehle, a professor of emergency medicine.
This helps explains how cars that consistently pass crash tests with
flying colours, such as the Honda Civic and the Nissan Cube, are some of
the deadliest on the road.
In Montreal, scientists sifted through data on three million Canadian
crashes and found driving an SUV instead of a car makes a driver 224 per
cent more likely to cause a fatal crash.
A study from the University of California, San Diego, meanwhile, found
every life saved in a large vehicle came at the expense of 4.3 dead
pedestrians, motorcyclists and car drivers.
In essence, of all the consumer choices Canadians will make in their
life, buying an unnecessarily large car is the one most likely to maim
or kill a stranger.
Back in the late 1990s, when Gabler was publishing the first
groundbreaking studies on the dangers of large vehicles, he says he was
surprised at how people reacted: SUV sales spiked.
“I’m not a sociologist, but people look after themselves and their
family,” says Gabler. “It’s a very human thing to do, I think.”
The sentiment comes up often in online debates over automobile safety.
“I care most about the people in MY vehicle,” reads one forum post by an
SUV driver, saying they are only trying to protect their family from
“moronic drivers Facebooking their way to oblivion.”
On another forum, a driver claims, “My SUV protects me from the actions
of IDIOTS.”
Part of this is because few drivers think they will be the ones to cause
a collision. A famed 1981 study found 93 per cent of American drivers
rated themselves as better than the median.
Drivers are also very prone to “illusory self-assessment” — being
hyper-sensitive to the mistakes of other drivers, while rationalizing
their own driving errors.
Going for a big car is also frequently backed up by the experts.
“Safest vehicle” lists are filled with SUVs. In the same University of
Buffalo study that found SUVs were rolling over passenger cars, the
authors were keen to note the “increased safety of SUVs.”
The result is an “arms race.”
“The other guy has a big car, so you’re going to feel unsafe unless you
have a big one too,” said Michael Anderson, an economist at the
University of California, Berkeley, who has examined the social cost of
driving on highways with increasingly larger cars.
Highways filled exclusively with Honda Civics would be about as safe as
highways filled exclusively with Cadillac Escalades, said Anderson. The
danger comes from a world where the Civics are smashing into Escalades.
And the safety disparity goes up precipitously when it comes to
aftermarket modifications, such as lift kits and oversized tires.
After his wife’s death, Taylor and his friends championed a pressure
group to regulate vehicle height, the Bumper to Bumper Campaign.
Laws governing vehicle height vary wildly across Canada. In Prince
Edward Island, it is illegal to raise a vehicle more than four inches.
While Alberta has rules on passenger cars, there are almost no standards
for trucks or utility vehicles.
“There really isn’t an enforceable legislation that restricts you from
adding suspension modifications — and we don’t track any other
modifications,” said Staff Sgt. Jamie Johnston, traffic services
coordinator for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
Johnston is also a 20-year veteran of crash reconstruction on the
province’s roads, including Highway 63, the notorious “Highway of Death.”
He said he cannot remember any crashes where a lifted truck caused
otherwise-preventable fatalities, but he’s seen plenty of small cars
turned to mush by larger vehicles.
“The smaller car is always going to feel the bigger bump,” said
Johnston. “Mass is always the deciding issue.”