To many people, the question that makes up the title of this article will seem like a quite obvious one. Many individuals – even seasoned drivers – reason that being surrounded by thicker steel, and more of it, is surely something that will only protect the driver more. This is not an unreasonable assumption to make, and there is some truth in it, but it isn’t even close to a general rule. The truth, as it happens, is a good deal more complicated than that. Or to put it another way, car safety relies on many more factors than just size.
You could say that it is the car’s safety features that protect you, and not really the car’s size. Accordingly, a good piece of general advice here is to always defer to the actual safety features a car provides and to take these as a better guarantor of protection than the mass of the vehicle. One thing that is certainly true is that new cars are safer than old ones and this can only be because the safety features are more advanced in newer cars.
Vehicle Size and Fatality – What is the Real Relationship?
Unfortunately, there are no easy answers to the question of big versus small where safety is concerned. It is worth looking at what the data actually shows us.
Indeed, taking solely fatality rates, a bigger car will fare better in a collision than a smaller car. This is elementary physics. If a large minibus collides at speed with a Mini Cooper or a Ford Ka, then it’s pretty obvious which driver is going to come out of the situation better. This rough conclusion is indeed supported by the facts, and in any case, it is a matter of simple physics. The smaller car in any collision will be pushed backwards by the larger one. Accordingly, there will be less force exerted on the passengers of the larger vehicle.
However, this is not all there is to the story. Pickup trucks and regular trucks, for example, had much higher fatality rates than family cars. It isn’t that these trucks are somehow defying the laws of physics, but rather that these trucks, whose whole economic importance relies on their ability to carry things, simply have less space left over for safety equipment.
In fact, it has been a well-observed trend for a long time that truck safety lags behind that of family cars. Rollercam, a company specializing in tie down straps for family cars and trucks alike, say that it is imperative to tie down cargo securely and keep it safe, which can sometimes take precedence over safety features. These are hardworking vehicles, after all, and not a vehicle for the driver’s family.
Safety Ratings Comparisons
When different vehicles are compared in terms of safety, it is very often some kind of safety rating which is deferred to and compared with other vehicles. This could lead to exactly the right conclusion, or it could lead to the wrong one. The important thing is to compare properly. For example, both the IHSS and the NHTSA issue safety ratings to cars which only apply between cars of the same type. In other words, a five-star rating for one type of car might not mean the same thing as a five-star rating for another – and you therefore cannot compare them.
So, if this strange question of big vs. small should teach us anything, it is that big can indeed be much safer than small, but there is always much more to it than that.
