Unsafe At Any Size

Last week, you might have seen a headline like this one from the Buffalo News: "Small cars, save for one, fail to make ‘good’ in crash tests."  That's a bit misleading.

The crash test that they're talking about is the Small Overlap Frontal test, in which a car hits something that's one-quarter the width of the car.  So it simulates hitting a small but solid object like a tree or a post.  It's counter-intuitive, but that sort of collision is harder for the car to withstand than hitting a larger object such as another car.  When you hit a large object, the front of the car is crushed, absorbing the energy of the crash.  But with a smaller object, less of the car is crushed, so it's not as able to absorb the energy.

But this article wasn't written because small cars did particularly badly, it is because all cars have problem with this relatively new test, and small cars just happen to be what they were testing lately.  I know this because I saw a previous article about how cars were having difficulty passing it.  In that case, the cars being tested were luxury cars.  Now that's surprising: small cars have less material to absorb impacts, so it does take more work to make them safe.  But if luxury cars are also doing poorly in the test, it's apparently about more than size.  Probably cars won't do well on this test for several years, until new models have been introduced that have been designed from the ground up with the new crash standards in mind.

I don't want to sound like I'm making excuses for the manufacturers - after all, they did mostly fail the tests.  But when you read a headline like the one above, it seems to contain two facts:

• small cars failed general crash tests
• the problem is specific to those cars

In fact, neither of those facts are true.  The cars failed one particular test, while passing all the others.  And this is true for cars of all sizes that have done the new test.