I believe the thinking is that since fatalities are more likely in cases of auto accidents with rollover than without, rollovers are dangerous. This is widely considered a safety issue, especially for SUVs.
But are they dangerous on their own or as a side-effect of some other danger? One confounding issue may be that higher velocity of impact or weight of an impacting car may be positively correlated with both higher fatality rate and higher rollover rate. E.g.: If a 30mph 3000lbs car t-bones you, you’re less likely to rollover than if it’s a 60mph 4500lbs truck t-bones you. But the latter danger would have be greater anyway.
In a way, a rollover could help to transfer some of the impacting energy over a large surface and a longer duration.
Rollovers are definitely a hazard if they cause you to have an accident when you otherwise wouldn’t or if it moves the vehicle into a ravine or something similar.
Rollovers used to be pretty common when the vehicle turned too fast. So yes, a problem on it’s own, not just the result of some other incident.
The combination of computerised vehicle stability control and mandatory seatbelts have greatly reduced the number of fatalities caused by rollovers, however. It’s still an issue, but not nearly as much as it used to be, and most SUVs are okay for passenger safety. (assuming you wear your seat belt.)
I’ll be damned if I can figure out what you’re trying to ask.
So I’ll just fire a few ideas into the eather and yuo can tell us which if any are relevant to what you’re thinking.
Given the reality that vast swathes of Americans still don’t wear seatbelts, rollovers break out windows and eject occupants far more than equally violent non-rollovers.
They also result in stove-in roofs that cause head injuries whether the occupants are belted or not. And when the occupants are unbelted, they fall / crash head-first into the roof pan, often causing neck injuries. None of these bad things happen in equally violent non-rollovers.
IOW, for any given amount of rogue kinetic energy, rollovers produce more and more severe injuries.
The issue with SUVs (and pick-ups) is that, pound for pound, for a given amount of rogue energy applied, they are vastly more likely to roll over than is a sedan or sports car. Resulting therefore in more and more severe injuries.
Late add: and for a given amount of driver ineptitude / panic, it’s much easier for drivers to overcontrol a tall vehicle than a low-slung vehicle. So even if they don’t collide with anything and are just successfully swerving, they’re still far more likely to roll the SUV/pickup with all the additional bad consequences described above than doing the same maneuver in a sedan.
And getting out of a vehicle that’s on its roof, assuming you aren’t crushed inside because the roof/pillars are pretty weak and not meant to hold up the weight of the vehicle in the first place, you’re crawling through all the debris and leaking gasoline which could also be coming down on you from above. To engineer a vehicle to withstand a rollover requires a pretty hefty steel roll cage such as you see on truly off-road vehicles, race cars, etc., and they impede severely on the interor space, not to mention visibility.
When I was young and stupid I took a corner too fast in a convertible VW Karmann Khia. The rear axle tucked under, the car rolled over and surprisingly ended up right side up on the inside of the curve. Which was lucky because there was a steep cliff on the outside of the curve. I was wearing a seat belt at the time and walked away without a scratch. The top mechanism was bent but not pancaked. This is just one data point but I think being T-Boned at an intersection is much more dangerous.
My big brother rolled his Chevy Citation into a snow bank. The only damage was a cracked windshield. He got the glass fixed, and drove it for another 80,000 miles before he sold it. Sturdy little car!
Rollovers are dangerous not only because of the difficulty in making a vehicle that will not collapse upon itself when inverted but also because of the peculiar dynamics which involve multiaxis impulses that seatbelts, airbags, and other passive and active restraints may not effectively protect passengers, as well as the possible danger due to lose objects in the car impacting passengers. The inversion of the fuel tank also poses a potential of leaking fuel impinging upon hot exhaust and igniting, and of course, the difficulty of egress and rescue from a vehicle which may have doors jammed and occupants in inaccessible positions for safe removal.
As noted, SUVs, by dint of their large weight and high center of gravity, are prone to rollover, but there are a number of passenger cars which also are known to have problems with rollover or flipping during high speed impacts, so it isn’t just an SUV and van problem.
Some years ago (in the pre-airbag era) my father hit a patch of black ice, skidded off the road and rolled over three times down an embankment. Structurally, the car held up but the windows were broken and the driver’s seat was broken into two parts and tilted backward. He broke three vertebrae in his lower back and wore a brace for weeks.