Reader question:
I’ve been looking at car crash test results, but they aren’t very satisfying. According to these crash test results, they measure what would happen to a car if it ran straight into a wall. When does that ever happen? What about if you’re hit by an SUV? Where are the crash test results that show the safest car when hit by an SUV?
Glenda
Fantastic question.
Kind of hard to give you a straight answer, though. The organizations that perform the car crash tests are the ones that give us all of our information, and since I don’t go around performing my own crash tests, I really don’t know how certain cars would perform if they were tested the way they really should be. I wish that the organizations that perform the crash tests would change their standards, because it’s true that right now they don’t measure up. They just aren’t practical and they don’t measure real life situations.
Knowing how safe a car is when hit by an SUV is very important, considering how big the difference is between the loss of life in an SUV that hits a car and those in the car in a collision: one in the SUV to sixteen in the car. If it’s car versus car, that ratio divides by half. Why is this? It has a lot to do with size, which is probably pretty obvious. The height of the car means that the bumper is higher, which means that when the two vehicles collide the bumpers don’t touch and decrease the force of impact. Instead, the bumper of the SUV rips into the car. There’s also the weight of the SUV, which is a big problem.
It also has a lot to do with the frames on which SUVs tend to be built, which are the same as the frames for trucks. These are made on steel beams, which obviously causes a lot of damage in a collision.
How do you stay safe against SUVs? Well, you could get an SUV yourself, but you probably don’t want to fight fire with fire. Rather, I would suggest that you check the crash test results done by the government and, ignoring the other crash test results, look at the side impact crash test results. These will give you a better idea of how a car would stand up to an SUV, although they are still not very accurate.
Cheers,
Fashun Guadarrama.