Brock Sides notes a study on SUV safety reported in the WSJ:
While light trucks represent 36% of all registered vehicles, they are involved in about half of all two-vehicle crashes with passenger cars, highway safety regulators say. In such crashes, over 80% of those killed were in passenger cars.
This is interesting, although it would be useful to know more. For example, how many miles are driven in each vehicle type? By what kind of drivers? Under what kind of conditions?
Says Brock:
So if you bought that SUV for “safety,” just keep in mind that you bought that safety at the expense of the safety of others.
Without a link to the study, that’s hard to say. But it seems much more likely that it’s mainly a matter of higher survival rates in SUVs rather than creation of higher mortality rates in cars. What are the comparative mortality rates in passenger car on passenger car wrecks? SUV on SUV wrecks?
I’d hazard an educated guess and say that the percentage of motorcycle riders killed in two-vehicle crashes with passenger cars exceeds 80%. So, by Brock’s logic, people who ride around in Honda Camrys are safe at the expense of motorcycle riders.
