I’ve been looking for this chart for a while. Look at how much the single vehicle accident fatality statistic changes between the 2 wheel drive and 4 wheel drive categories for pickups!
Remember that this statistic does not take in to account how many miles a vehicle is driven or driver behavior. A high single vehicle accindent fatality rate can indicate that a particular vehicle attracts risky drivers, as you can see with the 4x4 pickups.
edit: Fuel efficient cars can have an unfairly high fatality rate since they can be driven a lot more, or chosen by someone who does driving for work.
Ididn’t look at it because it just is not of much interest to me. I will say though that a vhicle with a higher center of gravity like a 4 wheel drive has a greater tendency to roll over. If you roll over then you are depending on seat belt and not having a lot of stuff in the car to get thrown around.
Of course you’re going to have more roll-overs (and thus higher injuries and deaths) in a 4wd vehicle. So what? You’re also going to have more rollovers and deaths in passenger vehicles compared to a Vette. Again - So what?
Suspensions on most vehicles have come a long way since the 90s. Not going to research it, but suspect a number of the 4X4 had solid front axles, no rear sway bars.
Not just suspensions, but overall vehicle design. Only the very large SUV’s these days are body-on-frame. Most small and mid-size SUV’s are unibody. This makes for a much more stable vehicle. Not the greatest for off-roading, but for everyday driving…far superior then body-on-frame.
My F150 4X4 handles better than my 70 Cutlass! The Cutlass even had aftermarket rear sway bar, ‘heavy duty’ shocks.
So comparing any old vehicles to new is usually apples to oranges.
I’m not saying the IIHS statistics are reliable, but how does having the 4x4 option on an F-250 result in 4 times the number of single vehicle fatal accidents?
Is the suspension significantly different or higher on the 4x4 version of the truck? I never paid much attention to whether the 4x4 version of a truck rode higher.
I had my car towed 50 miles. I don’t recall if the truck was a ford or Chev or a 250 or 350. But I commented that he didn’t have his seat belt on. He said just get ready if it’s an impending crash he’ll be laying down flat on the seat because on that model the steering column would spear him. Something about the way it was built. He was a good driver though so no problem.
I think he meant F series 4x2s vs 4x4s, yes the 4X4 are higher. Dropped my car off for service, walked over to the car lot while waiting for the shuttle, saw an F150 4x2, though an optical illusion, seemed smaller than my 4x4.
As far as I know, Ford only raised the ride height of the previous generation of Rangers, again, as far as I know, no other manufacturer has raised the ride height of any of their 4x2 to match 4x4s.
Looks like the link is now broken. I got a notification for this being my most popular link. For full size cars, I remember that the 1997 Toyota Camry had the lowest fatality rate. The 1998 Volvo 850 was in second place. The 4 wheel drive versions of the F-150 pick up trucks had fatality rates that were nearly double to 2wd versions, which is what I found surprising.
Did anyone save a copy? It appears to have been removed from archive.org as well. Does anyone have an old computer, or a browser that they stopped using just after viewing that? Maybe it is still in the browser cache. Don’t click the link again!
