Here’s what I noticed: Australia’s road toll has stopped falling and is even creeping up. At the same time, sales of SUVs have surged, overtaking sales of passenger vehicles.
They seem more dangerous than other vehicles.
So I began to wonder if all these SUVs on the road were having an effect. Are they the reason the road toll is creeping up? I rang road safety expert Associate Professor Stuart Newstead to find out.
Newstead slapped me down.
“Small to mid SUVs are like cars in terms of safety,” he said. “A medium SUV is one of the safest things you can be driving.”
While SUV sales have gone through the roof, that’s partly because SUVs have changed. We used to call them four-wheel drives, because that is what they were.
Now some SUVs are two-wheel drives. They are not necessarily very heavy either. They are really just slightly taller station wagons, or slightly taller hatchbacks.
It’s a classic case of correlation not being causation. Higher SUV sales aren’t necessarily making the road toll higher.
But Newstead pointed out something I wasn’t aware of. Utes are often more dangerous than SUVs, especially for other road users.
“This is a real problem because these commercial utes are being used as family wagons … It is more the commercial utes that are the problem in our fleet than actually SUVs.”
At the same time, SUVs were shrinking, utes have been growing. Your standard ute is no longer based on a Ford Falcon chassis. They are now largely four-wheel drive vehicles based on a truck chassis.
Holden sells a popular big ute called the Colorado. When I asked a spokesman to comment about its aggressivity, he said that even small cars are designed to cope with a big impact.
“For example, Holden’s smallest car, Spark, also comes with a five-star ANCAP rating (tested the same way as Colorado) and a bunch of safety features.
“What stands out here though is Spark’s structural safety. It has a high-strength steel safety cage that is capable of carrying a roof load of four times its own weight — so much more than a Colorado, maybe even two Colorados!” said the spokesman, Mark Flintoft.
“Colorado is not your traditional light commercial truck. The whole range is rated the maximum five stars from ANCAP and it has a long list of safety features available including forward collision alert, lane departure warning and trailer sway control. It’s even got a rear view camera as standard across the range to help with reversing in high risk areas.”
Toyota, which makes the top-selling Hilux, emphasised not only crash performance but crash avoidance technology.
“This has translated into increasingly absorptive chassis structures, and bonnets and bumpers designed specifically to mitigate the impact on pedestrians. Proactive safety — that is, designing vehicles to avoid an accident — continues to be implemented at a rapid rate, said Marcus Umlauff, Manager of Toyota’s Product Planning department.
“For its part, Toyota Australia actively invests in the safety specifications of all its vehicles and we strongly believe that our ongoing commitment to developing vehicle design in this area will continue to yield benefits for all road users.”
Some utes get good ANCAP crash ratings. But those ratings, in my opinion, are not too comprehensive. They put most weight on how the vehicles’ occupants perform in a crash. Less emphasis goes on how the other party in a crash fares.
Associate Professor Newstead says sure, big Utes can do well in a crash, but it comes at the expense of other road users. “They are safer if you hit a small car in them because you will just obliterate the small car.”
Newstead publishes a major report each year that covers car safety. It is not based on theoretical crashes like the ANCAP ratings, but on data collected in real world crashes. This way, he can measure not only how the crash test dummies in a car perform, but what happens to other road users, be they other drivers, motorcyclists, or pedestrians.
Aggressivity measures what a car does to someone else in a crash. Utes are some of the worst performers when it comes to aggressivity. You really don’t want to get hit by a Ford Ranger.
Newstead says the real downside of these vehicles is yet to come.
“The thing you have to worry about in this area is that in 10 to 15 years’ time
these cars are going to be in the hands of P-platers … and they are incredibly sub-optimal for novice drivers, especially when they haven’t got stability control — and commercial utes until recently haven’t. Novice drivers are great at tipping them over and they don’t go well when they tip over.”
TRADE OFFS?
Some big cars are really safe for their drivers, and really unsafe for everyone else. They are like tanks…
Continue reading here
Article Source: News.com
Image Source: News.com