A common justification for buying SUVs is the perception of safety. Sitting high and mighty in their heavy, rugged go-anywhere 4x4s, SUV drivers feel dominant and invincible. Never mind that early SUVs were notorious for rolling over and killing their occupants at a much higher rate than conventional cars. Remember the Jeep CJ-7? The Suzuki Samurai? The Ford Bronco II?
But those scandal-plagued nameplates are ancient history. Over the past 30 years or so, SUVs have improved by leaps and bounds. By one major measure of safety, SUVs now significantly outperform cars. The U.S.-based Insurance Institute for Highway Safety says that in 2016, the overall U.S. fatality rate for SUVs was 32 deaths per million registered vehicles (1-3 years old), versus 63 for cars and 48 for pickups.
Does that mean you shouldn’t buy a car? Not so fast. For one thing, some perspective: The death rate for all vehicle types has fallen dramatically, to 51 in 2016 from 256 in 1978.
More significantly, deaths per 100 million registered vehicles is not a perfect measure of vehicle safety. It doesn’t take into account how many miles are driven annually, or of driver demographics.
Back in the day when SUVs were the road-death villains, “it was pickup drivers who were getting these SUVs, a lot of them young men,” says Charles Farmer, vice-president of Research of the IIHS. “Now the SUV is a family vehicle.”
In the same vein, today’s car fatality rate is skewed higher by small cars, which, as Farmer notes, “are the ones you give to your new teenage drivers [who are] the riskiest drivers on the road.”
That doesn’t alter the reality that small/light vehicles have less structure and size to absorb crash energy, so crash forces on occupants will be higher. “People in lighter vehicles are at a disadvantage in collisions with heavier vehicles,” says the IIHS. With small cars being more likely driven by the young and inexperienced, it’s a double whammy.
Meanwhile, pickups and SUVs “generally are heavier than cars, so occupant deaths in SUVs and pickups are less likely to occur in multiple-vehicle crashes.”
The U.S. government got serious about safety in the 1970s, creating the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (Canada traditionally adopts the same standards as the United States). NHTSA’s early years were a saga of forcing reluctant automakers to make their products safer, but over time that dynamic has reversed. Recent measures like electronic stability control (mandatory in 2012), rear-view cameras (2018) and automatic emergency braking (by 2022, under an agreement with all automakers) were all first introduced by automakers, and later adopted by NHTSA.
Combine technical advances with changing demographics, and you see how the relative safety records of different vehicle types have changed over four decades, even as the overall death rate has plunged.
In 1978, passenger cars had 235 occupant deaths per million vehicles, rollover-prone SUVs scored 438, and pickups split the difference at 346. But in 1984 SUV deaths dropped sharply to the same level as cars, and for the next 20 years both improved more-or-less in tandem, while pickups remained significantly higher.
Then from about 2005, overall fatality rates started another sharp downward trend that was even steeper among SUVs, which now average about half the rate of cars. Since 2012, pickup death rates have also dropped below that of cars, though the gap is less marked than for SUVs.
Driver behaviour aside, how do passenger cars measure up intrinsically – that is, how well do they avoid a crash in the first place, and how well do they protect occupants when a crash can’t be avoided?
On the first factor, cars still have an edge in stability. NHTSA’s rollover rating gives most cars a four- or five-star rating, while three or four is more typical for SUVs (in the old days SUVs commonly got a one- or two-star rollover rating).
The more car-like construction has certainly helped improve SUV stability, but a bigger factor is the advent of electronic stability control. Yet even now, notes the IIHS, “pickups and SUVs are proportionally more likely than cars to be in fatal single-vehicle crashes, especially rollovers.”
Passenger cars tend to grip dry pavement better in cornering than SUVs. In Motor Trend comparison tests, for example, seven compact sedans averaged 0.82 g on the skid pad (a test of lateral acceleration) versus 0.80 for nine compact crossover utility vehicles (and 0.76 for full-sized SUVs).
Most SUVs have all-wheel drive, which helps keep them on the road when the going gets slippery. Among passenger cars, AWD is now widely available on luxury sedans and on many high-performance sports cars, but a rarity on mainstream sedans and hatchbacks.
As for crashworthiness, NHTSA sets standards and tests for compliance, but the de facto standards are the tougher tests conducted by the IIHS. It’s not easy to quantify progress over time, as the IIHS tests are a moving target. Besides more and tougher crash tests, the IIHS now also counts headlight performance, and the availability of automatic emergency braking.
“Each vehicle category has many poor performers when a new test is introduced, and then vehicles improve,” says Russ Rader, IIHS senior vice-president of communications.
IIHS’s need to keep raising the bar in itself speaks to the enormous progress being made by automakers. And it seems cars are more than holding their own. So far this year the IIHS has given out 81 Top Safety Pick awards, of which 31 earned the even tougher Top Safety Pick+ rating. And of those 31 TSP+ awards, 20 of them – 65 per cent – were cars.
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