Fans of
large vehicles professed their love of physics several years ago when, to no one’s surprise, it was announced that SUVs
and large cars offered significantly better protection to their occupants during a collision with a compact car. Let’s
see how they take this news, though – a group called the Partners for Child Passenger Safety has unveiled a report
claiming that children are just as likely to be injured in an SUV as they are in a car.
The study looked at
data only from ’98-up vehicles with second-generation airbags, and found that while SUVs provided a significant
improvement in safety during crashes where they remained upright (a one-third decrease in injury rate), the increased
chance of injury during rollovers (a 3x increase) and the SUVs’ propensity to do so (twice as likely as cars to end up
shiny-side-down) resulted in no net difference in the chance of injury to a young passenger (1.7%). Ah, Occam’s Razor
apparently is double-edged.
Still, something to take away from this is that there’s less than a one in fifty
chance of injury to a young passenger during an accident in either type of vehicle. That, to me, is quite impressive.