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Safety and Sport Utility Vehicles and Pickup Trucks
The WSJ had a small article today about SUV safety. With all the televised stuff about SUV roll-over, you would think that you are riding around on a can of gasoline with a lit match just waiting for a disaster. It seems that the data show something different.
Overall car safety showed 138 deaths per million registered cars and SUVs were at 140; about the same. Big SUVs over 5000 pounds had a rate of only 92 deaths per million.(The safest of all vehicles, period.) Small economy cars that the go'ment wants us all to drive topped out the list at 249 deaths per million.
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Safety and Sport Utility Vehicles and Pickup Trucks
I am not trying to convince anyone to buy a big SUV if they are not inclined to make the purchase. If you choose to buy a big vehicle and are involved in a wreck and someone dies; each one of us has to deal with that in our own way. What I am trying to do is point out the overall safety record, when the government and press seem to want to make SUVs sound like deathtraps ready to roll over if they hit a pebble on the road.
In my particular case, I have been hit several times by drunk or inattentive drivers. They have never significantly damaged my large vehicles. On the other hand, I have not had a citation in so long that I don't even remember when. It has certainly been over 15 years. I have never been at fault in an accident.
In one case, I had to stop for freeway traffic and I saw the idiot coming at me from behind not even paying attention to what was going on ahead of him. I put my head back against the rest, braced my arms on the wheel and waited to get hit. He put on his brakes just a few feet before hitting me. He slid under my GMC Sierra 4X4 and did virtually no damage. I drove home. He did not because of car damage. I don't feel the least bit guilty about having the large vehicle. If I had been in a very small car, I might be dead. (Not PC, not dead...both good things.)
As the Hummer commercial says, "Slip into something a little more metal!" BTW, my H2 is averaging almost 14 MPG in everyday driving. It gets much better gas milage than my 1992 GMC Pickup which no one picks on as a gas hog.
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Safety and Sport Utility Vehicles and Pickup Trucks
Chief, I know you were kidding. Any sentence containing Ms. Huffington's name probably has to be some sort humorous comment. We have kidded about Ms. H before, and this probably won't be the last time, either.
Another thing that I remember from a long time ago is that the cost to repair a Big SUV or pickup after a wreck was generally less than other vehicles. I am sure that this takes into account the amount of overall damage.
Another report that I heard recently on TV news said that some automobile owners are trying to get insurance rates for SUV owners to be higher because of the "higher cost to repair." The automobile owners claim that they are subsidizing the SUV owners. Apparently some insurance companies are following this trend.
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Safety and Sport Utility Vehicles and Pickup Trucks
Peters,
A Volvo is a good car. To some degree getting larger vehicles is sort of like an arms race, but it is essentially impossible to make all vehicles have the same bumper height and certainly not the same mass. There is just no way to make semi's, military vehicles, and construction equipment that share the same roads as the cars to be 100% compatible. I would never modify a vehicle by raising my 4X4 or lowering a car for street use.
As far as the H2 is concerned, it does share some production parts with the Yukon, Suburban, and other GMC vehicles. But the characterization of a sheep is wolve's clothing is not correct. The ways that those production parts are employed and mixed with new parts make all the difference. Ground clearance, wheel travel, wheel base, suspension geometry, and other critical aspects are very different from the Suburban. I think that the Suburban is a great vehicle, but it is for a different use.
I have been involved in off-road racing for nearly 25 years. I have taken the H2 through some rough terrain in Southeastern Utah near Moab. Those GMC production parts and construction techniques keep the cost down, but it is a very capable vehicle. The H1 is slightly better in my opinion off-road, but the H2 is a better overall vehicle, since even off-roaders spend most of their time on roads. The off-road specification is identical for both vehicles and they run on the same test track in Indiana.
I have built off-road vehicles including pre-runners, motorcycles, and Class V Baja Bugs from scratch. I am also an engineer. I have a Class V Bug in my shop right now that will go places that an H1 or H2 cannot cross. It can do that because the tires are big compared to its light mass, but I certainly would not want to be in a head-on collision with it. Even though it has a three loop roll cage, fuel cell, 5 pt harnesses it still does not have the mass to keep the driver from experiencing fatal levels of mechanical shock in a collision.
Unfortunately, the state where I live is in the top few for being the worst for drunk drivers. There are drivers here with as many as 28 DWIs and they are still driving. They have found ways around every precaution and penalty that the state takes to get them off the road. The statistics are such that at any given time someone on the road in my direct line of sight is drunk. Now, if you add others that are high on Methamphetimine, you have a real circus. If I can take measures to make sure that I am not a victim of this, I certainly will. It is not me that you would need to worry about on the roads, here.
What I don't have an answer for is how you keep the drunks and other impaired people off of the roads and out of large SUVs where they are likely to kill someone if they don't get stopped. Making the SUVs more carlike doesn't solve that problem or help the victims.
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Safety and Sport Utility Vehicles and Pickup Trucks
Randy, surely Arrianna's gut is from champaigne and not beer. If she spent more time climbing in and out of a tall SUV, she might work some of that off. 
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That was over a year ago in Mark's old neighborhood. Pretty amazing. I saw an H2 that was rolled off-road. It crushed the front right side, hood and windshield, but it was still driving. (not as bad as this picture)
There was a lot of damage up high on the H2, so bumper mismatch seems not to have been a factor. The hood is reinforced plastic like the fenders on my tractor. Do you think that the driver would have been treated and released if he had been driving a sports car when he had his seizure??
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Safety and Sport Utility Vehicles and Pickup Trucks
Murf, do you think that the four or five vehicles that the H2 hit before that had any "impact" on that?
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When we moved to NM, my wife had an Olds Cutlass that was coming off of a lease. We replaced that with a Pontiac Bonneville. After about a year of driving the Bonneville, my wife said that she thought it was "too big" and she wanted a Jeep. I still had my 1992 GMC pickup and that was even bigger.
Bottom line is that I bought the Jeep for her, but it had to have the big tires, upgraded tranny and differential and so forth. She likes it, but it is a little small for me.
I ended up driving the Bonneville for the three remaining years of its lease. I liked the car. I did not like driving it in traffic for the same reasons that Dennis mentioned. Someone must have been smiling down on me, because in every event when I have been hit by a drunk or inattentive driver, I was in my truck. I did better than 75% of my driving in the car.
I always liked my truck, but the Bonneville got better gas milage by far and my wife was not going to drive it. You get raped when you try to turn in a lease car early. But as Dennis said, headlights from trucks and tailgaters always caused an undue amount of stress while driving the car. There are a lot of accidents around here involving semi-trucks. We are at the intersection of two major interstates and there is a lot of long haul traffic.
I drove the Bonneville until the lease was up about a year ago. When I went to the dealership to turn it in, a new shipment of H2s was coming off the truck. I had already looked at other SUVs and was really considering a Cadillac car, but I liked the H2 and went in that direction.
I feel safer in the SUV. The numbers tend to back up that feeling of safety. I expect that I would be better off in a collision, but there are no winners in a wreck.
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Peters, I agree with pretty much everything you said in your last post.
My first "project" car was an Olds 442. When new, it was fast, but did not corner well. In college, I took classes in automotive engineering and modified the car for different suspension geometry and got it handling pretty well for the day. The motor and transmission were pretty good from the factory. We actually tested this car on a track layed out in a parking lot for my classes. I wrote a number of papers about the project.
During the 1980s I had a modified Mazda RX7. That was my basic street car. I am glad that I never had a wreck in that thing. The body panels were about as heavy as a soda can. Some of my friends set a land speed record at the Bonneville dry lakebed with their similarly modified RX7. Driving motorcycles gave me a different perspective about traffic and collisions, so I drove the Mazda defensively. I satisfied any "need for speed" that I might have had on a race track and flying small airplanes.
My offroad days started with motorcycles in 1972 and progressed to off-road cars and trucks after a pretty severe crash in an off-road motorcycle race in the California Desert. (I raced unlimited class bikes) Ultimately my off-roading turned into racing with a team in Baja California Mexico in the Baja 500 and 1000 races. I was also a professional off-road guide in Baja.
The suspensions on today's SUVs allow them to handle better on the street than my Olds 442 did when it was new. But, they still have a high center of gravity and if someone gets into them and attempts to drive them like a sports car, they are going to get hurt. I am generally not in favor of heavily modified vehicles any more. For cars, the most noticable mods seem to be on the engines and it is easy to over-power and out-drive the supsensions and safety equipment. The teenager that bought my Olds ended up killing himself in it; street racing. The guy that bought my Mazda gave it to his teenage son who totaled it within the first year that he had it; again street racing. These are the same streets that you and I drive on everyday.
People that modify trucks generally are after a "look" more than they are after some performance increase. In my experience, many of the trucks with the "look" do not perform as well as they should and generally the suspension modifications tend to degrade handling on newer vehicles. Most people just do not know how to set up the suspension correctly and bolt on parts are rarely selected and used in the correct ways.
I don't think that the answer to the safety question is to make the SUVs car-like. If the market wanted car-like SUVs, then the station wagon would still be popular. In my opinion the station wagon has largely been replaced by the Minivan and to a lesser degree by the SUV.
No matter what you drive, there will always be a larger vehicle that will fair better in a crash. You cannot eliminate trains, commercial trucks, military vehicles and construction equipment from crossing or using roads. But, I do have a choice on the type of vehicle that I drive, and that is often the only choice that is really available. Part of the answer may be to make the smaller vehicles more crash worthy, but as you said in an earlier post, people don't wear seatbelts like they should.
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Long wheelbase vehicles have always had an issue with tight steering and potentially high centering.
The fastest racers in the Baja races are the two wheel drive custom built off-road cars. Four wheel drive always does well, but it is not generally the fastest. They don't generally mention that the Toyotas and other trucks shown in the commercials are 2WD when they are trying to sell you a new truck. But these race vehicles can cost up to $500K and have little in common with a production vehicle.
When I checked the specs on the H2, I believe that it was 9 inches shorter than a GMC Yukon. It is wider by about 5 inches. The wheels are also moved out near the corners of the vehicle to allow for good approach and departure angles.
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