S.U.V.’s, Longtime Targets of Auto Safety Analysts, Get High Marks From I.I.H.S
06-09-11, 01:16 PM
#1
S.U.V.’s, Longtime Targets of Auto Safety Analysts, Get High Marks From I.I.H.S
June 9, 2011, 6:00 am
S.U.V.’s, Longtime Targets of Auto Safety Analysts, Get High Marks From I.I.H.S.
By CHERYL JENSEN
Drivers of today’s sport utility vehicles are among the least likely to be killed in a crash, according to the most recent analysis of driver death rates conducted by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. The full report appears in the organization’s latest status report, released Thursday.
Maybe even more surprising, the institute no longer cautions parents to avoid purchasing S.U.V.’s for their teenagers, which it did as recently as 2007 on account of the vehicles’ high centers of gravity, which could make them prone to rollovers.
“We have been seeing these patterns of improvements in S.U.V.’s,” said Anne McCartt, senior vice president for research at the institute, in a telephone interview. “But putting all this together and looking at it in different ways, it just really is striking.”
The driver death rate has dropped sharply for all types of passenger vehicles, but the most marked change has been among S.U.V.’s, the longtime punching bags of auto safety experts. According to the I.I.H.S., a nonprofit financed by the insurance industry, the widespread adoption of electronic stability control has positioned S.U.V.’s among the safest passenger vehicles on the road.
Electronic stability control, a crash avoidance technology, helps a driver maintain control of a vehicle by keeping it on its intended path and preventing skids. The federal government has issued a safety standard requiring electronic stability control on all new passenger vehicles starting with 2012 models.
The I.I.H.S. performs this analysis every few years to pinpoint differences in the on-road safety of different kinds of vehicles, and to track changes in the safety of the fleet over time. The last such analysis was in 2007.
The latest analysis ran from 2006 through 2009, which covered 2005-8 model years, and indicated an overall death rate of 48 deaths per million registered vehicles. This represented a 39 percent decline, from 79 deaths per million logged in the 2007 analysis, which ranged from 2002 through 2005 and included vehicles from the 2001-4 model years.
The decline, however, is most noticeable among drivers of S.U.V.’s, dropping 57 percent, from 65 deaths per million in the 2007 study to just 28 in the report released Thursday.
The report also included driver death rates for each of more than 150 individual vehicles, ranging from a zero death rate for seven models to 143 deaths for drivers of the Nissan 350Z sports car.
By vehicle category, the death rate was 25 per million for minivans, which have the lowest death rate of any body style; 28 for S.U.V.’s; 52 for pickup trucks; and 56 among cars. But when cars are broken down into size categories, subcompacts with four doors have a death rate of 82 per million, large four-door cars have a death rate of 46 and midsize cars a rate of 51.
To more accurately attribute these deaths to a vehicle’s characteristics — like the presence or lack of electronic stability control — rather than to the characteristics of the people who drive it, the I.I.H.S. adjusts data for other factors that affect crash rates. In the past it adjusted for the age and gender of drivers, but with this analysis, it adjusted for several other factors as well, including calendar year in which a fatal crash occurred and vehicle age.
Still, questions remain about whether electronic stability control is driving the trend in lowering deaths among S.U.V. drivers.
“There may be other factors, but we think electronic stability control is the primary factor,” said Ms. McCartt.
The institute’s research shows that stability control systems reduce fatal single-vehicle crash risk by 49 percent and fatal multiple-vehicle crash risk by 20 percent for cars and S.U.V.’s. They lower the risk of a deadly crash by 33 percent over all and cut the risk of a fatal single-vehicle rollover by 73 percent.
Thursday’s report also refers to the fact that the death rate among S.U.V. drivers recently has fallen much faster than those of car drivers, and this change parallels the increasing availability of electronic stability control.
S.U.V.’s are popular as family vehicles, Ms. McCartt said, and she allowed that a parent’s potentially heightened vigilance while driving one also might help to explain the lower incidence of driver deaths, but she noted the difficulty of accounting for this.
The redesign of S.U.V.’s could be a factor as well. In the push to make tall S.U.V.’s more compatible with and less damaging to cars in a collision, many automakers have lowered their chassis, making them less prone to rollovers. Major automakers are also trying to make their S.U.V.’s more carlike by abandoning the body-on-frame architecture of pickup trucks in favor of a theoretically more stable unibody setup.
Even so, a number of body-on-frame passenger vehicles, including the Jeep Wrangler, Nissan Armada and Xterra, and Land Rover’s Range Rover Sport and LR3 are among those with the lowest driver death rates in the institute’s study. Meanwhile, the vehicles with the highest incidence of driver deaths are all cars and pickup trucks.
http://wheels.blogs.nytimes.com/
S.U.V.’s, Longtime Targets of Auto Safety Analysts, Get High Marks From I.I.H.S.
By CHERYL JENSEN
Drivers of today’s sport utility vehicles are among the least likely to be killed in a crash, according to the most recent analysis of driver death rates conducted by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. The full report appears in the organization’s latest status report, released Thursday.
Maybe even more surprising, the institute no longer cautions parents to avoid purchasing S.U.V.’s for their teenagers, which it did as recently as 2007 on account of the vehicles’ high centers of gravity, which could make them prone to rollovers.
“We have been seeing these patterns of improvements in S.U.V.’s,” said Anne McCartt, senior vice president for research at the institute, in a telephone interview. “But putting all this together and looking at it in different ways, it just really is striking.”
The driver death rate has dropped sharply for all types of passenger vehicles, but the most marked change has been among S.U.V.’s, the longtime punching bags of auto safety experts. According to the I.I.H.S., a nonprofit financed by the insurance industry, the widespread adoption of electronic stability control has positioned S.U.V.’s among the safest passenger vehicles on the road.
Electronic stability control, a crash avoidance technology, helps a driver maintain control of a vehicle by keeping it on its intended path and preventing skids. The federal government has issued a safety standard requiring electronic stability control on all new passenger vehicles starting with 2012 models.
The I.I.H.S. performs this analysis every few years to pinpoint differences in the on-road safety of different kinds of vehicles, and to track changes in the safety of the fleet over time. The last such analysis was in 2007.
The latest analysis ran from 2006 through 2009, which covered 2005-8 model years, and indicated an overall death rate of 48 deaths per million registered vehicles. This represented a 39 percent decline, from 79 deaths per million logged in the 2007 analysis, which ranged from 2002 through 2005 and included vehicles from the 2001-4 model years.
The decline, however, is most noticeable among drivers of S.U.V.’s, dropping 57 percent, from 65 deaths per million in the 2007 study to just 28 in the report released Thursday.
The report also included driver death rates for each of more than 150 individual vehicles, ranging from a zero death rate for seven models to 143 deaths for drivers of the Nissan 350Z sports car.
By vehicle category, the death rate was 25 per million for minivans, which have the lowest death rate of any body style; 28 for S.U.V.’s; 52 for pickup trucks; and 56 among cars. But when cars are broken down into size categories, subcompacts with four doors have a death rate of 82 per million, large four-door cars have a death rate of 46 and midsize cars a rate of 51.
To more accurately attribute these deaths to a vehicle’s characteristics — like the presence or lack of electronic stability control — rather than to the characteristics of the people who drive it, the I.I.H.S. adjusts data for other factors that affect crash rates. In the past it adjusted for the age and gender of drivers, but with this analysis, it adjusted for several other factors as well, including calendar year in which a fatal crash occurred and vehicle age.
Still, questions remain about whether electronic stability control is driving the trend in lowering deaths among S.U.V. drivers.
“There may be other factors, but we think electronic stability control is the primary factor,” said Ms. McCartt.
The institute’s research shows that stability control systems reduce fatal single-vehicle crash risk by 49 percent and fatal multiple-vehicle crash risk by 20 percent for cars and S.U.V.’s. They lower the risk of a deadly crash by 33 percent over all and cut the risk of a fatal single-vehicle rollover by 73 percent.
Thursday’s report also refers to the fact that the death rate among S.U.V. drivers recently has fallen much faster than those of car drivers, and this change parallels the increasing availability of electronic stability control.
S.U.V.’s are popular as family vehicles, Ms. McCartt said, and she allowed that a parent’s potentially heightened vigilance while driving one also might help to explain the lower incidence of driver deaths, but she noted the difficulty of accounting for this.
The redesign of S.U.V.’s could be a factor as well. In the push to make tall S.U.V.’s more compatible with and less damaging to cars in a collision, many automakers have lowered their chassis, making them less prone to rollovers. Major automakers are also trying to make their S.U.V.’s more carlike by abandoning the body-on-frame architecture of pickup trucks in favor of a theoretically more stable unibody setup.
Even so, a number of body-on-frame passenger vehicles, including the Jeep Wrangler, Nissan Armada and Xterra, and Land Rover’s Range Rover Sport and LR3 are among those with the lowest driver death rates in the institute’s study. Meanwhile, the vehicles with the highest incidence of driver deaths are all cars and pickup trucks.
http://wheels.blogs.nytimes.com/
06-09-11, 03:08 PM
#2
Lexus Test Driver
I still see more SUV's in accidents than cars. Height and size of SUV may give driver false sense of security, and therefor encourage some risk taking. Hard to say.
06-09-11, 07:57 PM
#4
Lexus Champion
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