Reply to Americans' love affair with big cars is killing them

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[quote=Anonymous]Disturbing article in The Economist which analyzed 7.2 million road accidents involving two vehicles and found that heavier vehicles provide more protection to their occupants at the expense of those they hit.  It found:

The fatality rate is roughly seven times higher when colliding with a heavy pickup truck than with a compact car. As the weight of your car increases, the risk of killing others increases substantially.  For every life that the heaviest 1% of SUVs and trucks save (ie its own driver or passengers), more than a dozen lives are lost in the other vehicles.

The probability of suffering a fatality in a two-vehicle crash with a vehicle that is 1,000lb heavier (roughly the difference between a Toyota Camry and a Ford Explorer) boosts the likelihood of death by 66%.  A rough calculation is that if the 10% of vehicles which are the heaviest (ie more than 5000lb) were downsized to the next heaviest category (ie 4500-5000lb) then fatalities in multi-car crashes (which totaled 19,081 last year) might be reduced by 12%.

The safety benefits of vehicle weight suffer from diminishing returns.  Once a vehicle reaches a certain weight, making it heavier provides little additional safety but will inflict substantially more damage on another car.

In the US, the average new car weighs more than 4400lb and vehicles more than 5000lb accounted for 31% of new cars in 2023 (up from 22% five years earlier). A Ford Focus weighs about 3200lbs, a Toyota Rav4 weighs about 3500lbs. A Ford Explorer weighs 4500lbs, Jeep Wagoneer weighs about 6000lbs, a Yukon weighs about 5700lbs and a Chevrolet Suburban weighs about 5800lbs.

It is worth noting that the crash performance rating system used by the top auto-safety agency only takes into account the safety of the occupants of the vehicle in question, not the other driver or passengers.

This study doesn't take into account the increased fatality for pedestrians, cyclists, or other road users posed by heavier vehicles.
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