I’m sure that rolling over in a vehical is terrifying, but does this cause greater injury. We’ve all heard how SUV’s have a greater chance of rolling over, but what does this mean for the people inside?
Roof collapse and incipient smushing.
In a rollover situation, passengers and driver are more likely to sufer injury no matter what kind of vehicle they are in.
The fact that an SUV has a higher center of gravity and (generally) softer suspension, makes the likelyhood of a rollover higher, therefore increasing risk to occupants.
Also, keep in mind that while the car is shiny side up, the driver still can sometimes manage to bring the vehicle back under control. Shiny side down and you’re at the mercy of the gods.
Also, once the A pillar is crushed, the windshield collapses and you are suddenly dredging debris into the cabin.
Eh, it’s not so bad.
A Bronco II about 10 years ago, bald tires in the rain around a curve. Just where I started to accelerate out of the corner the back end started to slide. “No big deal” I’m thinking. Buffalo winters taught me how to handle this. Well it whipped into a 180° when I corrected and when the passenger side wheels touched the shoulder of the road- again I thought “no big deal” I’ve slid off the road before.
When it suddenly flipped on it’s side I went “whoa this is a new one.” It went over 3/4 of the way when the nice tree stopped me. Had it been an open field I wonder how many times I would have gone over. I checked made sure nothing sticky was oozing out of me, all 20 digits worked, and turned off the ignition. The hardest part was trying to get out. How do you hold open the door and climb without pinching off a finger? Another guy on his way to work helped me out and gave me a ride to my friends house who I was picking up for work.
We called a towtruck and used his wife’s car to go back the two miles to wait for the wrecker. When we got there, it was two cop cars and the fire chief. Jerry the cop (I love small towns) asked Mr. Goob is this yours? anybody else involved? I was OK so they called off the fire trucks and stopped looking in the bushes to see where the body was 
My friend came with the tow truck we got it back to my house. I had to replace one shredded tire and put in a new windshield that cracked. A mallet took out the worst of the dents. After that it was a “friendly” truck. The one whole side “waved” at you.
Very fast experience, now rolling over a '78 Thunderbird in a potato field, there’s something I don’t want to repeat!
Hah!
As QuickSilver mentioned, SUVs are just more likely to roll. Once ANY car rolls it’s generally pretty bad but SUVs can roll taking a corner too hard where as a normal car will under/over steer depending on drive wheels.
The problem is, SUVs are designed around ‘off road’ platforms. This means highly articulating and relatively soft suspension. They are not designed with cornering ability in mind. The problem isn’t the SUV, it’s the idiot drive who treats an SUV as a regular car (and for many car companies who sell ‘car like’ SUVs).
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- Some years ago one of the US print car magazines did a review of a Pinzgauzer. The magazine was Road & Track or Car and Driver or something similar, and it handled so badly that they saved the feature some months and ran it in the April’s issue, in which they also announced that they would no longer be doing any performance testing of Pinzgauers. It tipped over once on the test track, and again during an emergency swerve in city traffic. It was the slowest “modern” vehicle in the slalom that they had ever tested in at least the last couple decades.
http://www.pinzgauer.uk.com/
(the one they tested was a very-upright-boxy 4-wheeled one, not the 6-wheelers the current gallery mostly seems to feature… though they’re rather upright and boxy too)
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- Some years ago one of the US print car magazines did a review of a Pinzgauzer. The magazine was Road & Track or Car and Driver or something similar, and it handled so badly that they saved the feature some months and ran it in the April’s issue, in which they also announced that they would no longer be doing any performance testing of Pinzgauers. It tipped over once on the test track, and again during an emergency swerve in city traffic. It was the slowest “modern” vehicle in the slalom that they had ever tested in at least the last couple decades.
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I believe that with rollover accidents the most likely cause of fatality is ejection, or partial ejection (and not generally crushing). Failing to wear a seatbelt is a good way to get yourself killed in a rollover accident. It’s also true that cars sold in the U.S. are required to meet certain standards for A pillar strenght, specifically to reduce the likelihood of catastrophic collapse of the roof in rollover accidents.
Certainly SUV’s are less stable (on average) than saloons etc., but the main way in which you will die is by leaving your vehicle during the incident. Passive countermeasures for rollover usually focus on inflating a curtain airbag to reduce the risk of ejection.
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:eek:
Damnit, my wheels are in the air and how the hell am I ever going to explain these scratches on the roof… To say nothing of the fact that I’m about to slide into that pond… That’s it! I’m not sticking around to see how this ends! I’m leaving… 
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