Unsafe at any speed

People are thinking about their own safety when they buy an SUV. But what you point out is that SUVs actually kill more people who aren't in SUVs and kill them differently. Can you explain why?

SUVs are very dangerous to other motorists because they are particularly likely to slide over the bumpers and doorsills of the cars and into the passenger compartments. [Car manufacturers] have begun addressing this over the last two or three years -- three-quarters of the SUVs on the market have been modified. They've mainly done it by installing hollow steel bars below and behind the bumper. They're called Bradsher bars actually. These bars are designed to prevent the SUV from going into the passenger compartment.

The problem is that you still have hoods that are too high on these SUVs, and in a side impact, the taller the hood, the more likely it is to catch somebody in the head or in the neck in a car. I describe one very sad case in the book of somebody that was hit in the head by a Land Rover that struck her from the side while she was in a midsize sedan.

Someone might argue that this problem is going to persist regardless of what we do about SUVs. We have other kinds of trucks on the road, and there are always going to be bigger Mercedes and smaller sports cars. What makes it particularly terrible with SUVs? Because there are so many?

Exactly. Nothing is a serious problem if it's in small enough numbers. It's different when you have 10 percent of the vehicle fleet that is designed in a way that is fundamentally incompatible with the cars that are already out there.

Didn't Mercedes modify its truck almost immediately after it did a study?

Mercedes was the only automaker that was paying attention to this problem in the mid-'90s. There was a German motoring group that did some crash tests. For example, they crashed the Nissan Patrol, a full-size SUV, into the Volkswagen Golf. The Nissan Patrol leaped right over the hood of the Golf in a head-on impact and smashed into the passenger compartment. It did more damage to the dummy in the Golf than anything this motoring association had seen in any of its crash tests before. The same crash killed the dummy in the Nissan Patrol too. Why? Because the front end of the Golf got under the Patrol and drove the steering column up and impaled the driver.

The folks at Mercedes were more concerned about this than the American automakers because they knew that they also faced a more concerned public in Europe. They then designed their SUV with a low bumper. However, that bumper -- according to later tests that have since been done -- is not enough. Bumpers turn into aluminum foil in crashes above 10 miles an hour.

Is there any situation where it is safer to be in an SUV? For example, if an oncoming car were to hit you in your SUV?

Yes, there are situations in which it is safer for the SUV occupant to be in the SUV. The sad part is that people only think about those incidents. If you are in a head-on collision between a small car and a large SUV you're going to come out the worst in the small car. However, the small car is much more able to avoid the crash in the first place. Small cars can stop a lot faster, small cars can swerve a lot better. The top speed at which you can swerve into the lane on your right and then get back in your original lane tends to be a good 8 or 10 MPH lower in an SUV than it is in a car.

SUV buyers in many cases seem to be people who seem to have limited confidence in their driving skills and think, Well, if I'm going to be in a crash anyway, then I want to be in a tank. If you have any confidence in your driving ability, then you should be thinking that you'd rather avoid getting in a crash in the first place. Particularly since you can still get badly hurt in an SUV anyway. Heaven help you if you roll over. They're less than 2 percent of all crashes, but they're a quarter of all traffic deaths and three-quarters of the accidents that result in paralysis.

A lot of people think that when they give their child a first car, they want their kid in the biggest, strongest thing possible.

That is the most terrifying part of all. It really is. The single most terrifying safety issue with SUVs is SUVs falling into the hands of teens. It's so sad for these teens to get paralyzed. The young drivers are the ones who are most likely to make the errors of inexperience like hitting a curb. Yes, you can roll over a Corvette if you slide it into a curb fast enough and hard enough, but you're much less likely to do so. Same with a guardrail. Same with getting a vehicle onto the shoulder. The SUVs are much less forgiving of error. Teens make the most driver errors, and those are particularly likely to be errors that are single-vehicle accidents.

The automakers' own safety people don't recommend SUVs for teens. They recommend midsize to large cars. Anybody who really loves their kid should be also telling them to avoid getting into SUVs driven by friends, especially at night.

Would it be fair to say that the auto industry is really pulling the wool over people's eyes? Are they completely aware that these cars are unsafe and they're just enjoying their boom?

I wouldn't go that far, but I think that the auto industry was very late and slow in doing something about the safety problems of SUVs. The auto industry's efforts to educate consumers have been appallingly inadequate. Ford bought the nation's leading chain of private driving schools, Top Driver, more than two years ago. At the time they said they were going to design a course that will be a free course for anybody who buys a Ford SUV, and that course would teach people how to drive an SUV. You can't drive an SUV the way you drive a car. Unfortunately, the legal concerns at Ford have meant that writing this program has been a really slow process. They are still not telling people that you can't drive an SUV like a car. The ads are still promoting this myth of SUV safety.

Next Page: "The SUV boom has just begun"

• View blog reactions