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Worth Considering: A Vehicle's Good Safety Ratings Can be Canceled Out If They Crash Into a Larger Vehicle

Size matters

By Rain Noe - March 3, 2020

in Cars

Thank goodness for the internet. When buying a car, whether new or used, you can quickly look up current or past models to see what their safety ratings are. Safety should be of concern to the prudent; in America, you've got a 0.5% chance of getting into an accident each year. If those odds sound slim, consider that that's a 1-in-200 chance. It's not highly unlikely that someone could crash into you and vice versa.

Even if you purchase a car with good safety ratings, it's helpful to consider how those ratings are arrived at. Organizations like the IIHS (Insurance Institute for Highway Safety) and the NHTSA (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration) calculate the ratings by crashing the car into static barriers, like concrete walls and fixed poles. In other words, it's a car crashing into something that does not push back, so to speak.

This means you can have a smaller vehicle with good safety ratings, and a larger vehicle with the same safety ratings, all calculated by crashing into these fixed barriers. But if the smaller car crashes into the larger vehicle, the safety ratings can be mooted because mass comes into play. In a head-on collision, for instance, the larger vehicle will force the smaller vehicle backwards, delivering much more energy into the cabin of the smaller vehicle. This is typically bad news, as you can see in this demonstration from the IIHS:

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David Beck

4 years ago

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So are you saying owning a small car is not prudent? Ralph Nader went down this rabbit hole 55 years ago. Are you adding any new relevant information?

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- Bradley Johnson
  
  David Beck
  
  4 years ago
  
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  Watch the video.
  
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  - David Beck
    
    Bradley Johnson
    
    4 years ago
    
    Z
    
    1Z
    
    What makes you think I didn't view the video? What also makes you think this isn't the exact same thing Ralph Nader wrote 65 years ago? The point being yes, what you learned in high school physics is true, momentum.
    
    Are you advocating everyone should be driving a tank? I believe while safety is an important thing, it not the only thing. If it were, there would be a race to have the heaviest vehicle possible. This was the lesson 65 years ago, what exactly has changed?
    
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