LawTalkers - Cars and Other Driving Machines

March 15, 2005
Is the Car Unsafe, or the Driver?
By DANNY HAKIM

ETROIT, March 14 - One way of reading the new report by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety is that the Mercedes E-Class sedan has the safest design of any car or truck and the two-door Chevrolet Blazer the worst.

Another way to read the report, to be released Tuesday, is that E-Class drivers tend to drive more carefully than Blazer drivers.

The report, which analyzed the driver death rates of 199 vehicle models, gave an uncommon level of specificity for a crash study. Such studies tend to focus on the death rates in different classes of vehicles, like small sport utility vehicles or midsize cars, as opposed to giving data for specific models in each class. But the study found that in almost every vehicle class "the death rate for the worst vehicle was at least twice as high as the rate for the best."

For instance, among four-door midsize cars, the Volkswagen Passat performed best, with an average of 16 driver deaths per million registered vehicles annually. At the other end of the spectrum, the Chrysler Sebring had 126 driver deaths. Among midsize S.U.V.'s with four-wheel drive, the Toyota 4Runner had 12 deaths per million registered vehicles annually, compared with 134 for the two-door Ford Explorer.

The analysis by the insurance institute, a research group financed by car insurers, found that many of the best-performing vehicles were expensive luxury models with the latest safety technology, while many of the worst were cheaper models with older designs. Over all, luxury sedans, as well as midsize and large minivans and station wagons, tended to have the lowest fatality rates.

The report examined how 1999 to 2002 model cars and trucks performed on the road from 2000 to 2003. Only relatively popular models were studied and one critical demographic adjustment was made. Because female drivers aged 25 to 64 are less likely to be involved in crashes than male drivers, the study considered women of those ages in equal proportions to men, no matter the vehicle. That way, if one kind of vehicle attracted more women buyers than another did, the prevalence of women did not skew the results.

But other personality factors could not be adjusted for, for instance, minivans and stations wagons having low fatality rates both because of their size, which makes for larger crash-absorbing crumple zones, and because of who drives them.

"They tend to be driven by soccer moms and dads," said Adrian Lund, the chief operating officer of the institute. "They tend to be conveying their families and are careful when they are doing that."

Automakers expressed a range of concerns about the report.

Alan Adler, manager of safety communications at General Motors, said, "It is impossible in looking at these statistics to know what role driver behavior, such as drunk driving and driving without a safety belt, played in these deaths."

Studies by model are also rare, because they sometimes involve relatively modest amounts of crash data. Researchers from one major automaker, which declined to be named, said the limited amounts of data for some of the vehicles gave them pause, and they also found the age range of 25 to 64 used in adjusting for women to be arbitrary.

Russ Rader, a spokesman for the institute, said women who were younger than 25 or older than 64 tended to have higher death rates than women in the middle, making an adjustment less germane.

So how should a safety-minded consumer weigh the report?

Mr. Lund said his group's study of actual traffic fatalities should be considered alongside the results of its crash tests, as well as those conducted by the government. The government's test results are available at www.safercars.gov, and the insurance group's tests, which are intended to complement those of the government, and the full report, are available at www.iihs.org.

Another limitation of the report is that it does not include models that have had their debuts in recent years, and some existing models have been recently redesigned.

"What you want to do is look at crash test results of vehicles as well and pick vehicles that have good frontal crash ratings, good side-impact ratings, good head restraints, and check these results and see if that model has had a good record in the past," Mr. Lund said.

The average model in the study had 87 deaths per million registered vehicles annually.

The two-door Chevy Blazer had 308 deaths per million registered vehicles annually, the most of any vehicle in the study.

"The two-door Blazer is an old design, so it doesn't have the latest crashworthiness features built into it," Mr. Lund said. Further, two-door S.U.V.'s tend to be less stable than four-door versions. On the other hand, "two-wheel-drive S.U.V.'s are cheaper vehicles and they tend to get driven by younger males."

Young males are the highest risk group of drivers, Mr. Lund said. They tend not to wear their seat belts as much as other drivers, they are more likely to drink and drive and more often are speeding.

But the Blazer - not to be confused with the more recently designed Chevrolet Trailblazer - has also not performed well on crash tests, where driver behavior is not a factor. The S.U.V. received the lowest of four ratings in the institute's frontal crash test and only one out of five stars from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in its most recent rollover test.

The study reinforced some well-known traffic trends and also suggested that good design can trump them. Pound for pound, cars are safer than S.U.V.'s because S.U.V.'s ride higher off the ground and have a greater tendency to roll over than cars. Rollovers are particularly deadly, leading to one of every three deaths in motor vehicle crashes.

Large cars, and particularly luxury cars, have lower than average fatality rates. The Mercedes E-Class sedan, the best performer over all with 10 deaths per million registered vehicles annually, was one of the first vehicles to have electronic stability control as a standard feature. Stability control is a technology growing in popularity that helps drivers regain control of their cars when they swerve or spin.

"We feel we're on the forefront of safety technology, and this test, because it uses real world data, underscores our leadership," said Rob Moran, a spokesman for Mercedes.

Pickup trucks tend to have higher than average death rates. Among other factors, pickups are a challenge to design because their beds are sometimes loaded with cargo and sometimes empty.

Smaller cars and smaller S.U.V.'s tend to have higher fatality rates than medium-size and large models. Large S.U.V.'s tend to perform well because of their girth, though other studies have shown that that also makes them particularly lethal to the occupants of vehicles they strike.

But the Ford Excursion, one of the largest S.U.V.'s made, had 107 driver deaths per million registered vehicles annually, significantly above average. By contrast, the Toyota RAV4 was among the best performers, with only 18 deaths per million vehicles annually, even though small S.U.V.'s are a vehicle type that typically does not perform well in crash studies.

"We think this reflects changes in how these vehicles are being made," said Mr. Lund. "And we're seeing changes in driver demographics, with more women and fewer young males, who used to dominate small S.U.V.'s."