Motor Mouth
Your big pickup isn’t as safe as you think it is.
There was more than a hint of scandal to the U.S. Insurance Institute for Highway Safety’s latest pronouncements on July 30. It wasn’t so much that the four-door SuperCrew version of Ford’s F-150 was given a Top Safety Pick rating while the SuperCab and Regular Cab versions only received “marginal” rankings, but why.
It turns out that the SuperCrew version of North America’s topselling vehicle benefits from some extra frame bracing around the front wheels while the SuperCab and Regular Cab versions do not. So, while the SuperCrew passed the IIHS’s extremely tough front small-overlap test with flying colours, the SuperCab had its steering column pushed more than 200 millimetres toward the crash-test dummy’s chest, preventing effective airbag deployment.
It wasn’t quite enough for anyone to start drawing comparisons to the famous Pinto incident of the ’70s — when Ford coldly calculated it would be cheaper to pay out the lawsuits that resulted from its exploding econocar than retrofit a safer gas tank that would prevent the conflagrations — but plenty of pundits noted that the SuperCrew accounts for 83 per cent of all F-150 retail sales, making it the most popular version of the pickup. It’s also worth bearing in mind that the IIHS usually tests only one version of each vehicle, and it’s almost always the top-selling iteration, Car and Driver magazine claiming the F-150 re-test “was the first time the IIHS has witnessed such divergent results for one U.S.-specified car model.”
In fact, it was only after Automotive News pointed out the mechanical discrepancy between the various pickup models that the testing organization delayed its rating and then took the unusual step of testing a secondary trim level. General Motors and Fiat Chrysler were quick to jump on Ford’s snafu: GM saying it “applies a common design approach to safety crashworthiness across all light duty pickup cab configurations” while FCA claims “all Ram Truck configurations are designed and engineered to perform equally in impact tests.” Ford, meanwhile, announced it was taking “countermeasures” to improve SuperCab and Regular Cab safety, but not guaranteeing those countermeasures would be the extra bracing that is so effective on the SuperCrew. The IIHS was pointed in its rebuff, the difference shortchanging “buyers who might pick the extended cab thinking it offers the same protection in this type of crash as the crew cab,” said David Zuby, the Institute’s chief research officer. “It doesn’t.”
Why this matters so much, especially to female customers who Automotive News claims now influence 70 per cent of new pickup purchases, is the expectation that trucks are safer than the general vehicle fleet.
It’s simply not true. Oh, that one vestige of high school physics that we all remember — bigger is better when two opposing masses collide — still applies. Given a choice in a head-on collision, it is always better to be in the Lincoln Navigator than the Smart fortwo. But such have been the advancements in safety technology that the simple “Force = Mass x Acceleration” equation matters far less than it used to.
While 30 years ago, bigger vehicles might indeed have been safer than smaller (think full-sized pickups versus compact trucks, large sedans versus small coupes, and pickups versus anything), because collisions pose less of a threat now compared with rollovers and other calamities, pickups and large sedans are no longer the safest vehicles to be had.
Indeed, according to IIHS historical data, while passenger car deaths in the U.S. have dropped from a peak of 27,898 in 1978 to just 12,639 in 2013, fatalities in pickups have remained almost constant during the same period. And where cars once accounted for fully 83 per cent of all passenger vehicle deaths, that number has now dropped to less than 60 per cent, trucks and SUVs now making up almost 40 per cent of all motor vehicle fatalities.
Because of the handling dynamics of pickups — all that forward-biased weight resulting in more frequents spins and rollovers — single-vehicle accidents account for far more fatalities, 62 per cent versus 45 per cent, in trucks than in cars. Surprisingly, in frontal crashes, where one might expect the greater mass of trucks to overwhelm smaller passenger vehicles, the statistics are almost identical (only minicars, like the aforementioned Smart, fare significantly worse). Most interesting is that SUVs, which combine the superior handling characteristics of a passenger car (as well as their greater safety features) with the mass of a pickup, are the safest vehicles of all, with half the overall occupant deaths per million vehicles registered compared with pickups and cars.
Essentially, what the data say is that pickups, despite their huge mass advantage, are no safer than mid-sized sedans, and compared with SUVs they are twice as dangerous. Seemingly more incongruous was that the IIHS’s data also show that you are statistically less safe in larger pickups than in small, the fatalities per million registered vehicles showing a consistent increase from “small” through “large” to “very large” trucks — the difference most prevalent in singlevehicle crashes.
According to one IIHS expert, at least part of the explanation is that large pickup owners are so confident of their weight advantage that they don’t bother buckling up. Whatever the case, it would seem that the longheld conviction that one is safer in a large pickup is largely an illusion left over from those high school physics lessons.
Meanwhile, it wouldn’t seem to cost too much to make pickups safer. According to Automotive News, the “Frame Bracket with Crew Cab Protectors” that make the SuperCrew so much safer cost somewhere between $50 and $58 US.
Pickups and large sedans are no longer the safest vehicles
to be had