Sections: Auto Safety Dec 16th, 2007 4 Comments Based on a three hour drive from South Bend to Chicago in a recent severe winter storm:
Sections: Auto Safety Aug 12th, 2007 3 Comments This sort of speaks for itself:
As a comparison, here’s how the much much smaller 2007 MINI did in a similar test for the Euroncap.
Sections: Auto, Auto Safety Jun 30th, 2006 1 Comment This is some insane stuff. And yes, the driver walked away.
[ M3 Incident ] Speedtv
Sections: Auto Safety Sep 21st, 2005 No Comments 
Of course the ironic thing is that these photos of the don’t even look as bad as the 2003 Ford F150 that was tested in the US a few years ago:
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Sections: Auto Safety Jul 14th, 2005 13 Comments 
Well not quite. Maybe 5mph and above. I was witness to a rather scary accident the other evening evening. Here’s what happened. I was at a stoplight with three other cars. There was a Jeep Liberty in the left lane (I was in the right) with a turn signal. Both of us were north bound. Then there was another Jeep Liberty in the left lane facing us, next to them was a Jeep Grand Cherokee. The light changed and the Jeep next to us immediately begin to turn left into the intersection - apparently oblivious to the fact that this particular light had no left hand turn arrow.
Sections: Auto Safety Jan 20th, 2005 13 Comments Sad and ironic. Not only was he not wearing his seatbelt but he was involved in the classic SUV related fatal accident… the rollover:
Capt. Joe Lefler of the Lancaster County Sheriff’s Office said Havermann was driving the Explorer east on the interstate near Northwest 48th Street when the vehicle went out of control on the ice-covered road. He said the vehicle travelled into the south ditch and rolled several times.
Derek, who was thrown from the vehicle, was not wearing a seat belt, Lefler said. He said Havermann and Uphoff were wearing seat belts at the time.
In a column written for the Daily Nebraskan in September, Derek attacked seat belt laws as intrusions on individual liberties and expensive to enforce.
“It is my choice what type of safety precautions I take,” he wrote.
“There seems to be a die-hard group of non-wearers out there who simply do not wish to buckle up no matter what the government does. I belong to this group.”
[ I-80 crash claims UNL student's life (Journal Star ]
Sections: Auto Safety, Site News Jan 13th, 2005 No Comments And yet rear foglights (standard in EU countries) are almost unheard of in the US. Why is this not an issue in the automotive press? It’s also sad to see that one of two deaths from yesterday’s incidents was caused by an SUV rolling over.
[ Highway Crash ]
Sections: Auto Safety Aug 24th, 2004 1 Comment This is from the New York Times:
Over all, crash fatalities declined across the board in 2003 to the lowest levels in six years, the government figures show, with 42,643 people killed in traffic accidents in the United States. Much of the decline appeared to come from fewer people driving drunk and more people buckling up. But the United States has not made as much progress as some other developed nations, because rates of seat belt use remain lower here and because of the growing numbers of S.U.V.’s and pickup trucks, which tend to pose greater hazards than cars both to their occupants and to others on the road.Industry groups have insisted for years that S.U.V.’s are at least as safe as passenger cars, if not safer. One group run by industry lobbyists, called the Sport Utility Vehicle Owners of America, says on its Web site that it is a myth that S.U.V.’s guzzle gas or that their higher rollover rate makes them more dangerous for their occupants. Ron DeFore, a spokesman for the group, cited statistics from the insurance industry, which found last year that fatality rates for newer sport utility vehicles were markedly improved from older models.
“Most people have gotten a skewed vision about the S.U.V. and think they’re unsafe, and that’s just not true,” Mr. DeFore said.
But the main reason for the safety gap in S.U.V. and car fatalities, according to federal regulators, is that S.U.V.’s are more likely to roll over, a particularly deadly accident event that is a symptom of their higher ground clearance.
“It’s largely a function of the rollover problem,” said Rae Tyson, a spokesman for the traffic agency. “In certain types of crashes, you’re more likely to be better off in an S.U.V., but that is offset by the fact the you’re more likely to roll over.”
Joan Claybrook, president of the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen and a former top auto safety regulator, said, “There’s no question that the rollover problem with S.U.V.’s really undermines their safety.”
The traffic safety agency reported last week that there were 16.42 deaths of S.U.V. occupants in accidents last year for every 100,000 registered S.U.V.’s. The figure for passenger cars was 14.85 deaths for each 100,000 registered; pickups were slightly higher than cars at 15.17 deaths per 100,000, while vans were lowest at 11.2 occupant deaths for every 100,000 registered.
You can read the entire article here
Sections: Auto Safety, Site News Feb 22nd, 2004 1 Comment Here are some excerpts from a fascinating story first published in the New Yorker:
…The truth, underneath all the rationalizations, seemed to be that S.U.V. buyers thought of big, heavy vehicles as safe: they found comfort in being surrounded by so much rubber and steel. To the engineers, of course, that didn’t make any sense, either: if consumers really wanted something that was big and heavy and comforting, they ought to buy minivans, since minivans, with their unit-body construction, do much better in accidents than S.U.V.s. (In a thirty-five-m.p.h. crash test, for instance, the driver of a Cadillac Escalade–the G.M. counterpart to the Lincoln Navigator–has a sixteen-per-cent chance of a life-threatening head injury, a twenty-per-cent chance of a life-threatening chest injury, and a thirty-five-per-cent chance of a leg injury. The same numbers in a Ford Windstar minivan–a vehicle engineered from the ground up, as opposed to simply being bolted onto a pickup-truck frame–are, respectively, two per cent, four per cent, and one per cent.) But this desire for safety wasn’t a rational calculation. It was a feeling.
Over the past decade, a number of major automakers in America have relied on the services of a French-born cultural anthropologist, G. Clotaire Rapaille, whose speciality is getting beyond the rational–what he calls “cortex”–impressions of consumers and tapping into their deeper, “reptilian” responses. And what Rapaille concluded from countless, intensive sessions with car buyers was that when S.U.V. buyers thought about safety they were thinking about something that reached into their deepest unconscious. “The No. 1 feeling is that everything surrounding you should be round and soft, and should give,” Rapaille told me. “There should be air bags everywhere. Then there’s this notion that you need to be up high. That’s a contradiction, because the people who buy these S.U.V.s know at the cortex level that if you are high there is more chance of a rollover. But at the reptilian level they think that if I am bigger and taller I’m safer. You feel secure because you are higher and dominate and look down. That you can look down is psychologically a very powerful notion. And what was the key element of safety when you were a child? It was that your mother fed you, and there was warm liquid. That’s why cupholders are absolutely crucial for safety. If there is a car that has no cupholder, it is not safe. If I can put my coffee there, if I can have my food, if everything is round, if it’s soft, and if I’m high, then I feel safe. It’s amazing that intelligent, educated women will look at a car and the first thing they will look at is how many cupholders it has.”
During the design of Chrysler’s PT Cruiser, one of the things Rapaille learned was that car buyers felt unsafe when they thought that an outsider could easily see inside their vehicles. So Chrysler made the back window of the PT Cruiser smaller. Of course, making windows smaller–and thereby reducing visibility–makes driving more dangerous, not less so. But that’s the puzzle of what has happened to the automobile world: feeling safe has become more important than actually being safe.
…Most of us think that S.U.V.s are much safer than sports cars. If you asked the young parents of America whether they would rather strap their infant child in the back seat of the TrailBlazer or the passenger seat of the Boxster, they would choose the TrailBlazer. We feel that way because in the TrailBlazer our chances of surviving a collision with a hypothetical tractor-trailer in the other lane are greater than they are in the Porsche. What we forget, though, is that in the TrailBlazer you’re also much more likely to hit the tractor-trailer because you can’t get out of the way in time. In the parlance of the automobile world, the TrailBlazer is better at “passive safety.” The Boxster is better when it comes to “active safety,” which is every bit as important.
Does any of this sound familar? You can read the entire article here.
Sections: Auto Safety Jul 18th, 2003 2 Comments From CNN.com:
The number of people killed in sport/utility rollover crashes jumped 14 percent last year as total highway deaths hit a 12-year high of nearly 43,000, according to a government report.
Meanwhile, car crash injuries fell to an all-time low last year, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) said in its report, issued Thursday. Child and pedestrian deaths also fell, as did fatalities involving large trucks.
But SUV rollovers killed more than 2,400 people last year, a 14 percent increase from 2001, the government said. It did not offer a reason for the increase. Nearly two-thirds, or 61 percent, of all SUV fatalities involved rollovers.
It’s absolutely shocking to me how unsafe many modern SUVs and trucks are. For a good example you have to look no further than the most popular vehicle on the US roads: the Ford F150. SUVs have a rollover fatality rate that is nearly three times higher than passenger cars and are much more likely to actually rollover. You simply can’t expect to drive a tall, heavy vehicle and not be susceptible to the laws of physics.
Sections: Auto Safety Jun 17th, 2003 1 Comment From CNN.com:
“People in most small SUVs are likely to be seriously injured or killed in side-impact crashes, according to a report by an insurance group Tuesday.
The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, a nonprofit research group funded by auto insurers, gave “poor” ratings to seven sport/utility vehicles that it ran through crash tests. Many of those vehicles had received good ratings in separate side-impact crash tests run by the federal government.”
Sections: Auto Safety Mar 10th, 2003 1 Comment Another interesting SUV article - this time by the New Scientist:
Sport utility vehicles are among the most popular vehicles in the US, but Jeffrey Runge is not impressed in the least. As the US government’s road safety chief, and a former ER doctor, he is calling on the automobile industry to make these beefed-up hybrids of cars and vans much safer.
In testimony to Congress last week, he said that some types of SUV are so dangerous that he will not let members of his own family drive them.
But if Runge is right, why does his ultimate boss, George W. Bush, want people to buy even more SUVs? The answer is that the runaway success of the SUV means it has become too crucial to the automobile industry’s well-being to let safety worries affect its commercial viability.
President Bush’s new $674 billion economic stimulus plan includes tax incentives for small businesses to acquire SUVs - incentives so generous that many will effectively be able to acquire them free, by claiming them as a business expense against tax. Critics say this will not only boost the numbers of the biggest SUVs on the roads, but also encourage the design of even larger gas-guzzling models.
I hesitated to post this story since I’ve had so many SUV articles in the last couple months. But I’m reminded every commute how much of a critical situation this is. Here are links to several stories I’ve posted in the past several months:
www.bridger.us/2003/01/06/TheUltimateArrogantDrivingMachine
www.bridger.us/2002/12/16/CrashTestingMINICooperVsFordF150
www.bridger.us/2002/11/20/WouldJesusDriveAnSUV
www.bridger.us/2002/10/25/DemolishingMythsAboutSUVs.
Gabriel Bridger is an associate creative director, and part-time blogger living in Chicago. Bridger.us is a rambling collection of thoughts, comments, and various media in no particular order and, at times, of no particular merit.
