An editorial in the boston globe yesterday suggested states, basically, that fuel efficiency standards lead to small cars which has caused more deaths in the past 25 years
Okay, it’s written by Jeff Jacoby, who I usually consider to be a nitwit and try not to take seriously. But on the other hand, statistics are statistics.
I’ve always assumed that it’s the bigger cars (SUVs) on the road that are causing more deaths, and remember hearing somewhere that SUVs maybe safer for the occupants, but including the cars they hit, cause twice the deaths overall.
So I’m thinking, maybe it’s more dangerous in a small car, and maybe there have been more fatalities since fuel efficiency standards have gone up, but maybe that’s only because the disparity in car sizes has gone up. Smaller fuel efficient cars, hitting larger SUVs = more dead greens.
So who’s right here, or is the truth somewhere in between? Are smaller cars more dangerous only because you’re likely to hit a larger car, or are they more dangerous absolutely (e.g. are two small cars hitting each other more likely to cause fatalities than two SUVs?). Do SUVs cause fewer or more deaths OVERALL compared to a small car?
Modern vehicles are much better at crash protection than they were years ago, crumple zones, air bags, lap belts, etc. But there is a corresponding trade-off with fuel efficiency, this isn’t statistics, but more physics. The easiest way to make cars fuel efficient is making them lighter and smaller.
I offer the wonderful Ford Fiesta as an example-- Maybe you’ve seen one. My first impression was that it looks like a toy, where does the gerbil go? Wonderful gas mileage, but you are essentially riding around in a recycled beer can. That is, being America, your choice. On the other hand, we can play the Bigger is Better-- but if it comes down to an “argument” with an eighteen wheel tractor trailer with a load of cement blocks, a Ford F350 isn’t much consolation, either.
Myself, I prefer to drive larger vehicles-- Interestingly, since the popularity of SUV’s in the last 10 or 15 years, the Insurance companies have pondered charging SUV’ers higher rates, since they come out ahead, so to speak, against small car operators. That is some twisted logic, but nothing much surprises me anymore.
Americans LIKE bigger cars. So when you impose fleet fuel economy standards your company has a problem. They still want to build the big sellers and gas guzzlers (after all, a lot of these guys mucky-mucks have interest in oil too) but they need to conform to certain standards. Net result? A fleet that is skewed away from the standard toward the ends!
Fact of the matter is, if everyone drove a smaller car there would be far fewer deaths. Yeah, those SUVs are safer for the occumpants, but so are armored personel carriers. For goodness sakes, the last thing we need in the USA are tanks on the road (oh wait… that’s basically what SUVs are! excuse the sarcasm).
So this guy is partially right, but it’s easy to argue the opposite of his point which is to scrap the fuel efficiency standard all-together. If we could raise the bar for these monsters on our roads, we could remedy the situatioin too.
Bwuhahaha! Sorry, I couldn’t resist. Ever hear the line: “lies, damned lies, and statistics”?
I think you have actually hit on one of the big points on the size differential being a major factor (though not limited to SUVs). As Tedster pointed out, modern cars have many more safety features. I’d much rather drive a smaller, lighter car made in 2001 than a big, heavy one from 1976.
I am curious as to how this was arrived at:
It seems like a bit of a tricky number to come up with. Could it also be that 46,000 people died because they collided with larger vehicle? You can argue that increasing fuel efficiency has resulted in more deaths; you could also argue that not increasing fuel efficiency on trucks and SUVs has resulted in more deaths.
I did see and interesting program on TLC about car safety. You would think with anti-lock brakes and air bags and better seatbealts that fatalites would go down. Right? The problem is that if the driver feels safer in a car they tend to become more dangerous drivers.
One of the researchers suggested that all cars be fitted with a 12 inch steel spike mounted on the steering wheel pointed at the driver. That way people would drive defensively like you’re supposed to do.
“For goodness sakes, the last thing we need in the USA are tanks on the road (oh wait… that’s basically what SUVs are! excuse the sarcasm).”
I’ve started calling SUVs “dreadnoughts.” It just works on so many levels.
Big lumbering oil-burning things.
The people who buy an SUV because they feel safer in them would say (if they tended to flowery language) that they dreaded nought riding in their SUV.
The real Dreadnoughts were an ego toy for many of the nations that bought them, and many countries who didn’t really need one – and some who really couldn’t afford one – bought one (or more) anyway to keep up with the neighbors and to show that they had arrived among the World Powers. The parallel is obvious…
Nations kept building bigger Dreadnoughts just because other nations had built bigger Dreadnoughts. The natural extension of the logic that one has to have an SUV because it’s bigger and will “win” in an accident is that SUVs would have to keep getting bigger so that one wouldn’t lose one’s (perceived) size advantage.
Rather less than half of highway fatalities are caused by multi-vehicle collisions (“multi” here meaning “greater than one”). More are caused by cars running into deer, telephone poles, bridge abutments, etc. In this sort of accident, it really doesn’t matter what anyone else is or isn’t driving – it’s what you’re driving. All other things being equal[sup]1[/sup], econoboxes will fare less well than Sherman tanks under such circumstances.
Now, if we can convince all the wandering cervids to go on diets…
[sup]1[/sup][sub]Which, of course, they never are.[/sub]
Well, maybe. In the case of hitting an immovable object such as a tree or bridge abutment, I’m not sure how much protection additional mass lends. If your vehicle decelerates from 60 to 0 in effectively 0 time, you still have the problem of being moving at 60 mph when the car isn’t. So you’re still relying on crumple zones and safety equipment. A big car will have more in front of you to crumple, but then, SUV’s get around mileage requirements because they are small trucks. At least until recently, they weren’t required to have the kind of safety equipment that passenger vehicles have. So I wouldn’t mind seeing a cite that small modern vehicles do worse than SUVs when car meets tree. (Let’s face it, in most cases where a car goes disasterously off the road, high speed is involved, so your odds of surviving aren’t good anyways.)
I think the primary advantage of larger vehicles is, in fact, in car vs. car incidents which are ruled by what the navy types like to refer to as the “Law of Gross Tonnage”.
Still, the editorial is amazingly (or maybe not) ingenuous in the points it chooses to make. It’s mighty hard to state with a straight face that cars get 50% the mileage that they did in 1970 (including SUV’s, no doubt!), and claim that this is a bad thing. In fact, this thread really should be dragged over to GQ so that the arguments can be thrashed out.
I think I’ll just counter with an example and leave it at that. I drive a Subaru Outback station wagon. Not the giant station wagon that Jacoby feels we are all lusting after. It’s certainly no Vista Cruiser. But it gets extremely good safety ratings. It’s not a small car – I can fit a washer or a dryer in it comfortably. And, on a good day in highway driving, it gets 30 MPH, because it has the original 2.2 liter engine; small, but completely adequate. In other words, a car that follows CAFE and is in no way inconvenient, unsafe, or in any other way an affront to American sensibilities.
But because Americans are, let’s face it, power-crazed twits, this engine is no longer an option. Subaru’s standard engine is now a 2.5l, and they just came out with a six cylinder version. This last exceeds the Car Talk ratio of .6 HP/weight, making it, in their opinion, dangerously overpowered for its size.
The point is, without CAFE and other safety regulations, we would inevitably gravitate back to 1960 muscle cars, quick to accelerate, slow to decelerate, and let’s toss in a high center of gravity as well.
Moreover, SUVs are generally unsafe beasts because of high centers of gravity. Of course all this depends on make/model too. Safety features do more to protect one in an accident than anything else. The size of the car really only comes into play in MULTI-vehicle accidents, which is another reasons SUVs are the devil’s gift to humanity.
So, problem is we are all humans and none of us drive perfectly. No, not one, not even one. We all mistakes in driving and some will eventually crash. If you want to know about federal crash test ratings and so forth, you can look the things up. Generally, there are goods and bads in all categories that the feds test.
I mean, there is some truth to it. You are pretty safe driving around in a bus, for example, because of its size. So, everybody out of their car and get on some public transit!
I’m unfamiliar with this - how is it measured? Are they only looking at peak power, which is not a good indication at all of the overall performance characteristics of an engine? Are they making a blanket statement without any regard to the make or structure of the car when they come up with this stuff? I really hope it’s not something the guys on Car Talk came up with on their own. IMO, they are pretty much just slapstick liberal commedians and I tend to catch one gross engineering/automotive mistake per show I listen to. Therefore, I have essentially no respect for anything they may have come up with. And their “Puzzlers” are either so lame I guess the answer before they finish the question, or else contain one or more obvious urban legends.
I think you are using hyperbole here. I submit that evolutions in suspension, body structure, tire performance, and brakes mean that power and safety are not mutually exclusive items at all.
Well, hyperbole is my middle name, but I'm not sure there's a lot of room for debate here. As we get further away from each energy crisis, there's a trend towards bigger cars, with bigger, more powerful engines. Even the Honda Civic went from tiny car to mid-sized sedan. You can't do all that much about the laws of physics, so a big, heavy car is going to be harder to decelerate. Current style is for tall cars with a high center of gravity.
I’d want to modify Akatsukami’s statement to say something like “All other things being equal, smaller cars are more dangerous to the occupants.” That is, if the crumple zones, steering column, safety cage, restraint mounts, etc. were all engineered to the same standard in a smaller and a larger car, and you rammed them into each other, the occupants of the smaller car would suffer greater injuries. The argument could therefore be made that the larger car was more dangerous for other drivers. In the real world, no two vehicles are engineered compareably in these regards.
Case in point, if you excuse the hazy memory issues: I remember a press conference that the Detroit automakers held about 7 years ago when they were fighting the first Clinton administration’s attempt to raise CAFE standards. They were making exactly the same argument that the OP read in Jacoby’s column. As “proof” they showed a slow-motion film in which a large Lincoln and a small Geo were crashed into each other head-on (not offset). The front end of the Lincoln appeared to almost literally munch its way through the Geo. Everone in the audience was suitably impressed. Until some-one in the audience asked for the “numbers”: that being the readouts from the accelerometers, etc. installed in the dummies. These numbers are now translated into the five-star crash safety rating the Feds bestow. At that time, there was a standard that said, in effect, readouts of such-and-such indicate life threatening injuries, etc. The readings from this crash indicated the occupants of the Geo would likely suffer lesser injuries than the LIncoln, and that the Lincoln’s front-seat passenger would likely suffer serious head injuries.
Point, oh, yes, I should have a point here. Small, light cars that are properly engineered can provide a similar level of protection to many large heavy beasts. And they don’t roll over as easily.
Has anyone forgotten that very recently it was released that the Dodge Ram truck and the large model Ford Pick-up (I cant remember the model name) were rated with the WORST EVER results in front end colisions. The way they crumpled, coupled with slow deployment of the airbags, according to whoever tests these things, meant deadly conditions in crashes of as slow as 30mph. They scored much worse than any compact car tested.
Technology has made it possible for engineers to design smaller and more fuel efficient cars that offer significantly increased safety over their counterparts from a few decades ago. The new, smaller cars are safer.
If everyone drove the same kind of car everyone would be on an even playing field but that is not the case. For that reason I someday hope that I can convince Lola to drive a Suburban, preferably with a diesel and four wheel drive.
I saw the crash tests that were performed on the new pickups and the Ford F150, the Dodge, and the Chevy performed poorly. The only pickup that passed the test was the Toyota Tundra. One would be safer in a much smaller car if you were colliding with a fixed object. When you put the full sized pickup against something less than half it’s size the results will be much different.
energy = mass times velocity squared.
2500kg (truck) at 70 kmh = 12,250,000
1300kg (car) at 70 kmh = 6,370,000
The truck posesses nearly twice the energy that the car does at the same speed.
My Suburban would posess 20,041,000 energy units at the same speed. Almost triple that of a compact car.
Interesting data, but the only conclusion it really seems to support is that the most important bit of safety equipment is the wingnut behind the wheel.
My first conclusion is that a very reasonable path towards financial security would be to get someone who owns a Camaro to put you down as beneficiary on their insurance policy.
As for car-meets-tree, well they only have statistics for single vehicle accidents, without going into more detail as to the type of accident. And that data does more to support the safety equipment argument – basically pickup trucks of all sizes are death traps. Very, very small cars don’t come off too well in single vehicle accidents, but most small cars don’t do much worse than 3,500 lb vehicles.
If our primary question is going to be, “What kind of driver is safest?” rather than “What kind of vehicle is safest?”, we may want to take that question to GD, or even the Pit (and I think that there are a couple of threads in those fora already dealing with this subject). As I said previously, the data generally answer the question, “If everything is equal”…but those things never are.
To pick another question: are sport cars inherently so much less safer, or are they more often driven by testosterone-poisoning victims? I have no doubt that you can offer an interesting (and, if you wish it, colorful) answer to this question.
Mmmm, I’ll disagree with that to the extent that large cars seem to do a lot better (WRT occupant deaths) than small cars. Small cars do often do better than TWD trucks.
I’m just not seeing this trend. In Table 1, for example, the smallest station wagons actually do better than the 2500+ and 3500+ vehicles.
Only the biggest of the big cars have fewer single vehicle deaths, and it’s very hard to draw conclusions from this, because who’s driving those Buicks and Caddys? A much older demographic which is less likely to drive recklessly.
