Smallest Cars Perform Poorly in Crashes With Bigger Cars, IIHS Confirms
By Michelle Krebs April 14, 2009WASHINGTON -- Turns out, auto engineers have been right all along: size matters and you
can't defy physics in crashes.
The latest report from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) shows that even the best small cars do poorly in head-on collisions even with only somewhat bigger midsize sedans from the same manufacturer.
"Minicars as a group do a comparatively poor job of protecting people in crashes, simply because they're smaller and lighter," Adrian Lund, president of the insurance industry-funded group, said in a statement. "In collisions with bigger vehicles, the forces acting on the smaller ones are higher."
The IIHS notes that frontal crashes are the most dangerous traffic accidents, causing about 15,000 out of roughly 40,000 U.S. traffic deaths annually.
The IIHS crashed a Toyota Yaris into a larger Toyota Camry; a Smart Fortwo into a Mercedes-Benz C-Class (both made by Daimler); and a Honda Fit into a Honda Accord. Each vehicle was traveling at 40 miles per hour. All three small cars performed poorly, while the larger vehicles were rated Good or Acceptable. The small cars tested, however, receive Good ratings in government-conducted crash tests with fixed barriers.
The automakers issued statements challenging the validity of the IIHS test, saying the tests performed represented extreme and rare situations.
The government is imposing stricter fuel-economy standards on automakers, which will force the downsizing of the vehicles they offer. In addition, last summer's mad rush to small, fuel-efficient vehicles when gasoline hit $4 a gallon has prompted automakers to add more small cars to their portfolios.
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The results of this test are scary, but it does seem like an extreme example. Both vehicles traveling 40mph facing each other is essentially an 80mph crash test. Someone with more physics can do the math, but I'm guessing this leads to the smaller car taking 50-60 mph worth of the force, and the larger one only taking 20-30. The standardized tests seem more valuable for consumer decision-making.
This is not news. The IIHS has been warning people not to buy small cars if safety's a priority for years in its annual brochure about how to buy a safe car. It has been reporting the death rate by vehicle size for even longer than that. It isn't better known because most of the general media does a really bad job of reporting the safety story, and the car companies have muddied the waters by promoting their five-star crash (or sometimes "safety") ratings to delude consumers into thinking their small vehicles are just as safe as their large ones if the have that rating.
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