Reading the mail this morning and it turns out that car your least likely to have a fatal accident in and with the lowest risk of having a any injury or any kind is a Land Rover Defender???!! The most unsafe car apparently is a mini which wasn't a suprise though. The research was done by the department for transport examining about 180,000 crashes.
I have just mentioned this because it has been stated in previous threads that 4x4s are more unsafe than normal cars yet 7 out of 10 cars which were found to be the safest were 4x4s. The general concensus was that the bigger the car the more safe it is.
Although it makes me a bit worried about what would happen to the drivers of cars hit by 4x4s. Since a defender has a steel ladder chasis and i think it would cause massive damage to another vehicle.
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The most unsafe car apparently is a mini....
Not the BMW one though. The survey is in fact refering to the Austin/Rover one.
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Maybe the reason the defender is so safe is it can't go over 50 without sounding like the engine's going to explode...?
Mike
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The defender may well be safe in a small collision but wait till you have a big one and your face ploughs into the rock hard dash and the engine and so on move back and crush you.
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i know one thing, i wouldn't want to have an accident WITH one, it would probably going roaring straight over you and not even notice!!
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Or when it manages to jump over the crash barrier in the central reservation and slide on its roof at 70mph into the face of oncoming traffic
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You wouldn't want to roll one of those: light alloy body crushes flat.
They've killed quite a number of people that way.
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Thing is, most Defenders are driven slowly by farmers on quiet roads. Well not most, but they're much less likely to get up enough speed to hit anything with enough force to kill you, at least compared to most cars on the road.
The Mini, meanwhile, has very little weight or crash protection and is driven on a wide variety of roads, usually with some verve.
A Defender might be the safest place to be in general, but it doesn't make it the safest place for your particular driving, whatever it is that you do.
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I have seen the report, its on the DfT website.
It claims that the data is for the driver only, based upon car to car collisions, so no surprise then that all the big heavy 4x4's come out on top (Newton said something about that...).
The newspapers have simplified the data a bit, because the levels of confidence differ for all models depending upon exposure to accidents etc.
I would not like to be in a Defender in a crash - no airbags, pre-historic seat belts and a nice hard dash!!!.
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I haven't found the bits I can half remember yet:
a number of Squaddies in a Defender which rolled off the M6?
vets Trude Mostue and ??? Leonard rolled one in Africa - they were lucky to survive.
but this is a start:
www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,5844-594732,00.ht...l
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I haven't read the report, but if you're studying cars that have already crashed, aren't you taking out of the equation how likely they are to crash and merely studying how dangerous they are once they've crashed?
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I mentioned the defender at the start of the thread because it was apparently the safest car on the road, in case you haven't seen the article the car that comes in at number 2 is the land rover discovery, and the shogun comes in at 5 with the Jeep Cherokee aswell with the Range Rover in the top ten as well.
I thought it was particulary significant that 7 out of the top safest cars were 4x4s.
These other 4x4s are less likely to be simply used on farms and regulary see a lot of them tearing up and down motorways in towns etc. So it seems in the real world of car crashes that bigger is better and that 4x4s are in fact safer than normal cars. But god help drivers of little cars like me if they come crashing into us!
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All things are relative of course. We all agree that a Metro or Panda wouldn't be such a good place to be if we were to be rammed. We're moving up a couple of categories by discusing the bigger 4x4's and the points raised here are relevant. Moving up a few more categories.... In a previous incarnation, I attended a Nissan hatchback which, for whatever reason, stopped on a 2 lane motorway standard flyover with no hard shoulder, thus leaving only one lane for all and sundry to get around her. The first few following vehicles managed to avoid her but the one that didn't was a tipper lorry of the sort that works out of gravel pits - i.e. as big and heavy as they get. It literally went straight over the top of the Nissan and carried on for some distance and stopped well in front of said hatchback. There was virtually no damage to the lorry and the driver was physically unscathed. The mother and 2 babies in the Nissan were less fortunate. So, scaling that down a bit, I can well see why some would, understandably, percieve that the height and weight of the 4x4's in question here would offer relatively more protection. The matters of relative instability at speed and less effective crumple zones are less tangible and reliance of sheer bulk and increased height of the occupants thus raising them above the normal point of side impact are the primary factors which I believe appeal. That, and the snob value whilst dropping Tarquin and Tara off outside the school gates.
KB.
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What most people forget about defenders is that there are no crumple zones. All the 'G' forces go straight through you via a thin strip of seat belt ---ouch. Just imagine you were daft enough to try walking into a wall would you rather do it holding a cardboard box infront of you or lead with your chin. So if you've got a Landie perhaps you should carry all those bales of hay on the bumpers.
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YSD
a) How many young people and speed junkies drive a Land Rover?
b) How many of above mentioned groups drive a Mini?
Answers: a) Not a lot. b) A lot.
Could that have anything to do with the results? Not that I disagree though with the basic premis of your posting. I have seen a film of an impact between a small car and a Land Rover like vehicle. The results are more one sided than you might imagine.
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Hardly surprising that the mini fared so badly in crash tests as it first rolled off the production line in 1959 and saw little more than a few cosmetic changes in all it's days. Crash protection was not an issue in those times.
What is more surprising is that the Polo came out so badly in the tests. Perhaps the designers figured that most other motorists would get out of the way of a German car and didn't bother.
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Drive defensively - buy a tank....
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