helitack wrote:How many of those single car accidents involve not wearing a seat belt?
I'll stick with my damn near three ton vehicle thank you very much.
They're mostly rollovers. And that would actually only indicate that SUV and light truck owners are less likely than car drivers to wear seatbelts (which I find believable).
Here's an exerpt from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administrationâ€™s report on its research priorities for 2005-2009.
The first priority listed was "Address Incompatibility Between Passenger Cars and Light Trucks." There's a ton of issues that have only recently been acknowledged, but have always been known by car drivers:
The height difference means that the bumpers of SUVs and trucks are much higher than the doors, hoods and bumpers than cars' and so more likely to kill people in a passenger car they hit.
Their headlights are much higher, so more likely to blind car drivers.
Their height also blocks the views of car drivers.
Reducing the hazards associated with vehicle incompatibility is one of the Agencyâ€™s top priorities. In 2002, NHTSA identified rollover and vehicle compatibility as two of its highest vehicle safety priorities.
In the last decade, for the first time, more vehicle occupants are being killed in crashes between passenger cars and light trucks than in crashes involving only passenger cars. From 1980 to 2002, fatalities in car-to-car crashes decreased from 6,488 to 3,121, while LTV-to-car crashes increased from 3,718 to 5,590.
Although total occupant fatalities in two-vehicle crashes involving a passenger car and an LTV (pickup trucks, sport utility vehicles [SUVs] and vans) decreased slightly in 2003, the ratio of passenger car occupants killed to LTV occupants killed increased slightly â€“ from 3.97 to 4.06. An analysis of 2001 Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) data indicates that passenger car drivers are three and one-half times more likely to die than LTV drivers in front-to-front crashes between the two vehicle types, and the fatality rate for drivers of passenger cars struck in the side by LTVs is approximately three and one-half times greater than the fatality rate for drivers of LTVs struck in the side by passenger cars.
The larger mass and size of LTVs, along with significant disparities in stiffness, compared to passenger automobiles, and recent analyses of crash data, have raised a number of issues of concern. In the crash avoidance area, there are problems of glare due to higher mounted headlamps on LTVs. In the crashworthiness area, there is concern that the protection of occupants in smaller vehicles is being compromised when their vehicles collide with the larger and heavier LTVs. As the trend toward greater private passenger use of light trucks continues, the Agency has continued to extend pertinent passenger car standard requirements to LTVs, and it expects to continue to apply new and revised standards to all light vehicles, not just passenger cars.
But all that has nothing to do with fuel efficiency. Sorry for thread drifting.