I would like to give these numbers to a statistician and see if it gets to be “significant” as we look at the P value (the odds of it just being “accidental”). That might explain why the Camaro and the Silverado are there and the F150 and the Mustang are missing.
I think, overall, I am happy I am not driving my Ford Focus to work everyday now. I never felt unsafe, but then you tend to be the smallest car on a major freeway.
If small cars are such death traps, then everyone who ever spun out at 200+ mph and crashed into the wall in a 1600 pound Indy car should be dead.
@B.L.E. It’s a little different when the car costs 7 figures and there’s a reinforced safety cage around most of the driver, who is strapped in with a racing harness in a fitted seat and wearing a helmet and fire suit. And people do die in Indy crashes, sometimes pretty spectacularly. It’s also rare when someone hits the wall head on at that speed. Usually they bounce and the wheels take the brunt of the impact.
Shadofax, the reason some of the small cars you mentioned didn’t make the list is because they are new models or didn’t sell in large enough number to be included.
Excellent illustration, B.L.E. If weight were the only factor, there would also be a whole lot of dead competitive drag racers too.
Besides, very, very few people buy behemoth vehicles because of safety concerns anyway. They buy them to impress the neighbors. A few buy them for towing, and a few buy them for working, but IMHO most buy them as a form of conspicuous consumption.
Divide the number of deaths by the number of vehicles sold during the years of the study to normalize the data. That evens the playing field.
Hell, I can virtually gurantee my personal safety…Army M35 6x6 transport truck.
I kind of agree in general…but gurantee ? ;-)))
I have ridden in variations of these trucks. So while a low speed collision with anything else might be oK, I would not feel particularly safe it ever lost control and started to role. Bouncing around inside where everything, and I mean every thing inside is completly unforgiving didn’t seem too advantageous. They are by their nature…slow. Remember too…the guys in back.
Speaking of the military and feeling safe in a vehical. Get a load of this. I guess when you have a choice, you don’t always choose the biggest and baddest to feel safe. Someimes you just want to “fit in”.
http://www.americanspecialops.com/vehicles/nstv/
LOL, it’s almost impossible to go to a war zone in a third world country without seeing a Toyota pickup! I wish I had $5 for every photo I’ve seen of revolutionary warriors in Toyota pickups.
Now, if you REALLY want to be safe…
http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=giant+pickup+trucks&qpvt=giant+pickup+trucks&qpvt=giant+pickup+trucks&FORM=IGRE
Apparently I am seeing something different than everyone else. The top 7 on the list are supposed to have 0 deaths per million registered vehicles, yet I don’t see any vehicles in this group that have sold a million vehicles during the study years.
I bought a 2014 Legacy last December and while I like that it is on this list, 2014 was the all time best sales year for that model, and Subaru sold 52,287 Legacy’s in 2014. The study period was from 2009 to current, mostly 2011, so that is 5 years at most. The numbers just don’t add up. The bottom 10 have models with a lot more sales.
@the same mountainbike"Besides, very, very few people buy behemoth vehicles because of safety concerns anyway. They buy them to impress the neighbors. A few buy them for towing, and a few buy them for working, but IMHO most buy them as a form of conspicuous consumption. "
After watching SUV drivers speed, tailgate, weave through traffic, all while talking on cell phones, you can certainly understand why I feel that their “concern for safety” is mostly pretense.
@keith No problem with the numbers. If a car sold less than a million, just divide by the appropriate number. The results are normalized to a death per million registered cars. So if, say, a half million were sold, and 5 people died, then it would listed as 10 deaths per million registered cars.
I love how folks zoom off in ‘small cars aren’t death traps’ and ‘so everybody must buy a tank’ extremes. The point is neither. Just that a larger car typically has fewer collision deaths.
For me, I’d buy an intermediate (Accord/Fusion/Camry/etc.) instead of a compact to get some of that benefit. Not a tank, not a 3 ton SUV.
@keith
You confirm the issue I have with the data. This is not a randomized study with all the factors being equal. The number of cars sold from each make/model is different, also the demographics of the buyers vary a lot. I imagine the minivans and the large crossovers, spend most of their miles on local streets catering to kids & their activities. The number of lethal accidents in those situations is going to be less than cars that are used for highway driving/work.
texasas, your theory only works if there are deaths. When there are zero deaths and the modal has sold significantly less than a million, then you don’t know if there might have been some deaths if the model were more popular.
I don’t know where the complete list can be found, but models like the Camry and Accord probably do sell over a million in that period. Lets say one of those had two deaths, but if the Legacy sold another 50k and had one death, who would have the better record then. It would count as 3 per mill then in the Legacy. On low selling models, one death really skews the numbers.
But there was another point made by this study, you have a 30% reduction in your chance of being killed in the current generation of cars than in the previous generation. All cars are getting safer.
Good point, I missed it the first time.
It might be noted that the Top Ten list is said to be the ten worst. Maybe the reason the Challenger, Mustang, and others are not on there is that luck of the draw didn’t get them in.
If the list was the Top Twenty, Thirty, or what have you then all of them might have a special place in that honor roll…
Regarding Chevy trucks, a salvage I deal with specializes in late mode pickups. Those things are wiped out in droves; usually by younger farmers who think they’re NASCAR’s next big thing, oil field and gas useage, etc, etc. They blow past me all the time at 20 over the limit no matter the conditions. This type of driving comes back to bite many of them.
Personally, I consider Subarus to be very safe cars and to go along with VDCdriver’s comments on WRX drivers I will say that I’ve seen more than a couple of Subarus at the drag strip.
Every single one of them was a WRX. It’s not unreasonable to think that the WRX owners may be a little heavy footed out on the public roadways.
My guess is that the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety has detailed data on their website.
B.L.E., your comments about so many large vehicles being driven with abandon is an outstanding observation pursuant to any discussion about size vs. safety. I doubt seriously if safety even enters the minds of most of them when making their purchasing decision.
^Actually, I think my perception of the “out-to-lunch-soccer-mom” driving a behemoth SUV, poorly, is at least partially true: I think a lot of “big steel theorem” advocates are at least dimly aware they are sub-par drivers, and therefore tend to want to surround themselves with as much mass as possible.
OTOH, I have always led an adventurous, high-risk lifestyle (private pilot, motorcycling, skiing, mountaineering, etc), have (generally) held high-risk jobs that involved power tools. For ME, considering a car that’s slightly bigger…or has a few extra air bags…always brings to mind the phrase, “poor power to add or detract”: my risk of “death by misadventure” is high enough that “safe car” vs “less safe car” makes a difference to my TOTAL risk that is essentially a rounding error…
If the pay was right and they wanted a human crash test dummy who would be given a choice of vehicles I know which one I’d take…
What I would like to know how the deaths occurred. If somebody drives a car drunk and hit a tree head on that should not be the car’s fault. Again if there is a 5000 pound suv hit a 2000 pound car head on and the driver of the car dies while the driver of the suv survives, in my mind that is not a fair comparison. To trust these numbers the factors must be the same.
A local farmer drove his almost new Chevy pickup in front of a fast moving freight train one afternoon.
Another local farmer and rancher pulled his out in front of 90,000 pounds of loaded wheat truck which broadsided him at almost 70 MPH.
Wonder how those are factored in to any studies. Both farmers deceased of course.