Driving small doesn’t mean you’re less safe

Dan Carney • E-mail

Until very recently, Americans supersized their vehicles the same way they supersize their fast food. After all, more is better, right? But with the price of gasoline hitting $3 or even $4 a gallon, more Americans are slimming down their vehicle purchasing habits.

Many are thinking smaller. Honda, for example, recently reported the most Civic sales ever during the month of May. “Small is big right now,” notes Dick Colliver, executive vice president of Honda’s American operations.

However, going from big to small feels uncomfortable for American drivers. While many don’t mind the thought of giving up some surplus cargo space or towing capacity that went unused in large cars, they balk at the idea of trading away safety for fuel economy.

These consumers formed their impressions of small car safety at a time, decades ago, when their ability to protect occupants in a collision left much to be desired. Small cars used to fare poorly in laboratory crash tests and produced grossly higher fatality rates in real-world driving.

But that notion is outdated. Crash protection has been growing, along with the size of the small cars themselves, over the years.

Crash fatalities in the smallest cars on the road fell by 15 percent between 1985 and 1995, according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. That was the period when airbags went from a novelty on luxury vehicles to standard equipment on all cars.

Today, small cars feature an array of impressive technologies and thoughtful design touches aimed at maximizing their safety, including front and side airbags. High-strength steel withstands blows with less intrusion into the cabin, and electronic driver aids such as antilock brakes and electronic stability control help reduce crashes.

These factors produce cars that are dramatically safer than the little cars of yore. Additionally, today’s small cars are much bigger and heavier than those of the past. Consider that a 1984 Honda Civic hatchback weighed 1,830 pounds. The lightest version of today’s hot-selling version of the Civic tips the scales at 2,628 pounds, and the Si version weighs 2,945 pounds, more than half a ton heavier than the 1984 model.

Significantly, most compact cars like the Civic approach the 3,000-pound mark that the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety has identified as the weight that provides good crash protection on highways populated with many big trucks and SUVs. That’s the point of diminishing returns, beyond which each extra pound adds less crash protection, according to IIHS spokesman Russell Rader.

What about truly small cars?

The 1985 Chevrolet Sprint weighed 1,540 pounds — that’s less than the tiny, bulletlike cars that raced in the Memorial Day weekend Indy 500. Today’s equivalent, the Chevrolet Aveo, weighs 2,348 pounds.

And the all-new 2008 Scion xB weighs 3,086 pounds when it’s equipped with an automatic transmission. Remarkably, that’s heavier than a 1986 Ford Taurus or Buick Century.

These numbers show today’s small cars aren’t the flyweight deathtraps many consumers suppose. That’s due to stiffer government requirements and consumers’ growing insistence that new cars earn top scores even in non-mandatory crash tests.

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