SUVs twice as likely to kill a child compared to a minivan

by philg

Living in the western suburbs of Boston, surrounded by Millionaires for Obama, seemingly every third car is a pavement-melting SUV, purchased by rich parents anxious to protect their precious children. Spending $50,000 for a Volvo XC90 or $70,000 for a BMW X5 and enjoying less interior space than a Hyundai Sonata sedan seems like a great deal to them because Precious Little Johnny’s safety will be guaranteed. What if the parent had cheaped out and bought a $10,000 minivan being discarded by a rental agency instead? Conditional upon an accident actually occurring, the minivan kid would have half the risk of death or injury. That’s right! A child in an SUV accident, even after adjusting for all possible age factors, is twice as likely to be killed or injured compared to the same child with the same driver in a minivan accident. Read the full article from Injury Prevention.

[I learned this while researching a new review of the Honda Odyssey on which comments/corrections would be appreciated. I’ll be adding photos soon.]

8 thoughts on “SUVs twice as likely to kill a child compared to a minivan”

  1. I’m not surprised. I have always been a proponent of avoidance of an accident rather than trying to drive through one in a DOT approved tank. SUVs can not turn, stop, or accelerate to avoid impacts- just continue in a straight line and hope mass overcomes all obstacles. I have avoided many accidents with braking and handling. For the record, I am a 43 year old, driving since age 14 (they used to allow that in Kansas) 15k/year driver who has almost always driven smaller, sportier cars and have never been in an accident. I feel safer with my kids in my M3 than in an SUV. Situational awareness beats an engineering crumple zone solution every time.

  2. Any place you can go camping with 4.3″ ground clearance isn’t much fun, unless you park and hike in — in which case God help you dragging along the contents of a minivan.

    Of course, 99% of SUV owners will never leave the pavement deliberately (given strong enough guardrails, many will never leave it at all). This is why most SUVs have lost their ground clearance.

  3. On my Odyssey the automatic side doors were slow, unresponsive, frequently buggy, and expensive to repair. Get the regular doors.

    The leather seats were an uncomfortable and nasty boondoggle. Avoid them even with internal heaters.

  4. Last time we were car shopping (c. 2005), we bypassed the Odyssey in favor of the Pilot because seating a fifth passenger meant folding up the rear-most seats, which demolished the cargo space. It sounds like this issues is resolved now?

    There’s little hope for ever finding good electronics and software from a car company. At Google or Facebook, software is the top priority, and talented developers can expect to be well rewarded and have many chances for advancement in their careers there. At Honda, a software developer will always be a distant second (or fifth or fiftieth) behind the mechanical engineers and car designers when it comes to career opportunities.

    A smart car company would be well advised to outsource their software and electronics to a company focused on that business. Heck, even IBM or Microsoft could probably do a better job after a few tries. Hand it off to Google, and the cars will drive themselves..

  5. Is the SUV or is the (SUV) driver? Drivers of SUV, usually, are bad drivers and they buy SUVs because they feel more secure. Others, are people who like to drive fast but have to take the whole family with; so they sell the porsche and buy a SUV. Either case, they crash no matter the car. The authors of the paper should have looked into drivers history (if possible) and looked at the number of incidents they had before buying a SUV. And what about normal cars? Maybe it is that minivans are less dangerous: given that they are used to get (lots) of children around, the driver feels more responsible and prudent…

  6. Dino: Good question. If you read the article (the full text is hyperlinked from the original posting) you will find the data are for vehicles that have crashed. The likelihood, per mile driven, of a crash, is not part of the study. So if an SUV owner is twice as likely to crash as a minivan owner, the risk of death for his kids would be roughly 4X as high as for the minivan owner’s kids (since the SUV is more likely to crash and, given a crash, the children inside are twice as likely to be killed or injured).

    In more familiar language (to nerds), the study was not regarding the conventional statistics of deaths per passenger-mile. It was a study of the conditional probability of death or injury GIVEN that an accident had occurred.

  7. I had a ’96 Chrysler Grand Caravan after I left college, I replaced the radio with a CD player w/ AUX jack for hooking up an iPod. I now have a limited edition ’08 Saab car, which you’d think they’d spruce up to no end. The difference between my rusting van with cd player and the Saab? The $2000 nav system I don’t use, heated seats, and the need to open the back seats, and take off my front tire whenever I put my bike inside.

    Although, I guess Saab splurged for the 12 cent RFID chip, since it’s impossible to lock the car if the keys are inside. Technology has certainly advanced in 12 years.

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