Why a station wagon is better to drive than either a pickup truck or a SUV (sports utility vehicle) is the subject of today’s blog.
Per Driving.com, “While 30 years ago, bigger vehicles might indeed have been safer than smaller (think full-sized pickups versus compact trucks, large sedans versus small coupes, and pickups versus anything), because collisions pose less of a threat now compared with rollovers and other calamities, pickups and large sedans are no longer the safest vehicles to be had.” Plus “Indeed, according to IIHS historical data, while passenger car deaths in the U.S. have dropped from a peak of 27,898 in 1978 to just 12,639 in 2013, fatalities in pickups have remained almost constant during the same period. And where cars once accounted for fully 83 per cent of all passenger vehicle deaths, that number has now dropped to less than 60 per cent, with trucks and SUVs now making up almost 40 per cent of all motor vehicle fatalities.”
Thus I must conclude that a pickup truck is not something that I would want a Mother and child in at all, due to the fact that it has a higher chance of rolling over versus a car.
And how about those ubiquitous SUVs that you see just about everywhere? Well they are safer in a collision than a car, but they also more prone to rolling over than a car. In an article it states that “The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) found that a total of 22,543 passenger vehicle occupants died in 2015, 26% fewer than in 1975. This study also showed a dramatic change in the types of vehicles involved in crashes since 1975. Regular car fatalities were down almost 50%, while SUV and pickup truck fatalities have increased significantly, with the likelihood of SUV accidents 10 times as high.”
It seems to me that the accident safety record of a medium sized station wagon would be so much higher than that of either a pickup truck or SUV. One thing I have to point out is that the smaller type SUVs are not as high off the ground as their larger counterparts and thus do not roll over as easily as the large SUVs.
The old fashioned family station wagon, not the super large ones of old, are much more likely not to rollover and to survive a collision than either a pickup truck or large SUV. The minivan also has a higher center of gravity which makes it easier to roll over in an accident than a car. But an New York Times article says the following, “In a study first published in the journal Injury Prevention, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Michigan and the Center for Injury Research and Prevention at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, looked at fatal and injury-producing crashes between 2000 and 2006, involving 1998 to 2007 model vehicles. The S.U.V.’s included classic body-on-frame models, as well as crossovers, which use car-type construction. When it came to crashes that caused injuries but not deaths, Dr. Dennis Durbin of the Center for Injury Research and Prevention said children in minivans were 35 percent less likely to be hurt than children in S.U.V.’s.”
So it looks like if you need a vehicle larger than a station wagon, you should get a minivan rather than a SUV.
I have known for sometime that people have the idea that bigger is better as far as safety is concerned. Well as you now know from reading this blog, that is not true at all!
That is my opinion- Jumpin Jersey Mike
