Featured Which cars are safe for the other guy?

Pickups and large SUV are what's the most deadly.

Bigger, heavier, higher … large SUVs and pickups pose serious safety threats to vulnerable road users – Parachute

 

I appreciate the concern, "killer cars," but could not read the article, paywall. But articles like this bring out the abysmal safety metrics, Having visited the Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) and seen the good and bad, it is a shame we don't get vehicle safety analysis like we get the EPA metrics. I saw this in the "Bell the Hybrid" back in 2008.

At the time, "silent cars", the Prius in particular, were blamed for being a hazard to pedestrians and bicyclists. The number of fatal Prius accidents was very low but I noticed a left and right turn bias. This led to a credible hypothesis that the width of the "A" pillar was a root cause during turns. Larger "A" pillar, more pedestrians during turns into the "A" pillar. The Japanese data showed a similar bias on right-hand drive vehicles.

The most recent "kill cars" were hit pieces against "heavy EVs." Only people noticed EVs are not heavier than ordinary cars. For example, my Model 3 weighted 3,800 lbs which pretty well matches SUVs and pickups. In fact, the EPA metrics include vehicle empty weight and soon punctured this propaganda.

More telling, only Tesla publishes their crash metrics for all models as a function of no Autopilot, Autopilot enabled, and Full Self Driving (FSD.) Of course they do this to sell their cars and sell FSD. But it has been criticized for not including other crash metrics.

The crash testing is better than not but focused only on the occupants of the vehicle. There are driver limited vehicles like the Chevy Volt that felt like driving a "fox hole."

In a perfect world, there would be an annual, crash summary giving rates for all vehicles in the FARS database. It is not that hard of a problem but also the "third rail." Individuals can do it as I did back in 2006-2009. It remains a business opportunity ignored by too many car reviewers. In the absence, I'll protect my self with NHTSA and IIS crash metrics . . . flawed as they are.

Bob Wilson

 

Thank you Captain Obvious. Yes ... a cement truck/land barge/18wheeler will crush a micro car. A micro car will crush a pedestrian or a bicyclist - because staying home or diminishing big vehicle buyers are not solutions.

 

Have the crash standards between cars and personal trucks become the same, or are they still more lax for the truck?

In addition to being less safe for the occupants, the lax standards make trucks less safe for the other cars. Less effective crumple zones mean more energy going inside the cabin, and to the other vehicle. Just having a higher bumper can mean a worse outcome for the car being hit.

An EV car may be heavier than the ICE car, but it is still a car. The safety standards will mitigate the effects of the weight difference. In past studies, it wasn't simply a weight difference in effective, but car vs truck.

Another important metric is that the majority a 'car' crashes involve just one vehicle. Hitting a stationary object, like a telephone pole, is the same as hitting a vehicle of the same weight and speed.

 

I quite agree!

My late wife was narcoleptic and I have treated sleep apnea. Autopilot meant either one of us could suffer a 'micro sleep' event and be a hazard to other or ourselves. There are so many single driver accidents from teens to elderly that I suspect undiagnosed sleep disorders are more wide spread than we know.

Bob Wilson

 

just another fossil fuel funded ev hit job, nothing to see here

 

Relevant to this topic is a re-run of a couple of my recent posts in another thread, concerning a report several decades ago, when standards where lower, pickups and SUVs still had much lower crash compatibility requirements than passenger cars, and their higher bumpers and grills frequently rode over the top of cars' protective structures to more deeply penetrate the passenger cabin.

https://eta.lbl.gov/publications/analysis-traffic-deaths-vehicle-type

"I remember reading the report Gokhan referenced back when it was first released. Here is one of its relevant charts. One thing that then jumped out at me was that the Honda Civic just as safe for its driver as a Ford Explorer, but twice as safe for the driver of the other vehicles it tangled with. Some other SUVs were a bit better for their own driver, but worse for the other drivers. All pickups scored worse, some far worse, on both measures."

...

"That's what happened when customers defined "safety" as 'killing the other guy without killing yourself'. A paraphrase of an actual SUV owner interviewed in a 1990s Seattle Times article about the then-increasing popularity of SUVs.

I added some markers to that chart posted back at #50, to illustrate the problem:

"

Another report of that same era (I haven't tracked down a modern link to it), confirmed that heavier vehicles in a given class were "safer" in multi-vehicle crashes, at least in the meaning of 'killing the other guy without killing yourself'. But when passenger cars and light trucks were tabulated separately, it also revealed that trucks were carrying a lot of 'wasted' weight not contributing to their own safety. I.e. cars were significantly safer than trucks of the same weight.

That was at a time when cars had to meet a lot of federal crash safety regulations, but trucks were mostly still exempt. Federal requirements have since been very significantly tightened for both, and I haven't seen an equivalent study updated to modern models.

 

We should have a congressional investigation into telephone pole placement. Or ban them completely!!!

Mike

 

It's all about cost. Moving below & above ground wires 100' further away from the roads. The utility companys lobby own various legislators.
.

 

i wanted to move the lines from the pole to our house underground when we remodeled.
for five grande, they are still overhead

 

Just $5k? It must have been a very short run.

 

60', 16 years ago. there were no obstructions, so it was trenching and conduit, plus utility pole work.