Size Really Does Matter

By Author: Marcus Stalder
Total Articles: 491
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There's a very disturbing trend in vehicle design coming out of Japan and Europe. Unlike Americans who prefer the maximum possible metal around them like a cocoon when they drive, Japanese and Europeans are physically smaller people. They can get into tiny boxes on wheels that look like the type of die-cast Johnny Lightning toys we had as kids. Obviously they don't eat as much over there. Anyway, these strange things like the Smart Fortwo and other not quite as small vehicles, are now appearing on our city roads. So, they are easy to park and they do an amazing number of miles per gallon. But put them on the same road as SUVs and you have a Goliath vs David problem. In Biblical terms, small may be agile and can get out of trouble fast, but in a straight head-to-head, the mismatch in height is going to be fatal. The problem is that the bumpers don't match up. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety has just published a study based on its crash test data. Even very low speed collisions between vehicles of different heights produces big differences in damage.

As a statement of the obvious, SUV bumpers are set higher on ...
... the vehicle and they run over the bumpers on little cars and cause thousands of dollars in damage. Why? Because the SUV bumpers are hitting a part of the smaller vehicle's body not designed to withstand a collision. What makes the danger worse is that side impact crashes can affect the deployment of the airbags. In any event, if airbags are deployed in a cheaper vehicle, this usually means the insurer decides to total it.

So here's the thing. Although we can joke about the Europeans and the Japanese making smaller vehicles so they are less expensive to buy and run, these vehicles are actually less safe when colliding with the traditional US vehicles. How then should the auto industry react? Until the price of gas went sky high, we were a land of trucks, Hummers, and SUVs. Gas consumption was not an issue and the weight of vehicles was not a consideration. Our culture thinks bigger is better. This creates a problem for manufacturers. If they lower the height of the bumper on bigger vehicles, the bumpers will get ripped off in even a slow collision. If the manufacturers of the smaller vehicles are told to increase the height of their bumpers, it will completely destroy the designs.

The first reaction is already coming from the auto insurance industry which is steadily increasing the premium rates on smaller vehicles. If they are more likely to be totaled, the premiums must rise to cover the all-or-nothing claims. Even at 10 mph, the damage can be immense. So before you buy any of these smaller vehicles, get as many auto insurance quotes as possible on all the makes and models and see how much they are going to cost to insure. Whatever you save in gas, may be eaten up in higher premiums.