Here's something for government regulators and policy-makers to ponder: Are they willing to trade safety for fuel economy and lower emissions?
That's the stark choice that begins to emerge after the latest crash test scores from a highly influential safety research organization funded by the U.S. insurance industry. Minicars - small, fuel efficient and thus by definition relatively "green" -- did poorly in car-to-car frontal crash tests with midsize sedans at 56 km/hour.
No surprise here. This is all about the laws of physics. When an object of greater mass meets an object of lesser mass, the smaller one loses. Sort of like what would happen if Mike Tyson smacked me in the kisser.
In these tests by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, mini Toyotas, Hondas and Smarts fared worse than I would after three rounds with the former heavyweight champ.
In fact, the Toyota Yaris, Honda Fit and Smart fortwo all collapsed into the space around where a driver would be. In this test the driver wasn't breathing; crash test dummies don't do that. But a real person would not have fared well in such a mash-up. Head and leg injuries would likely have resulted even though air bags deployed in all three cars.
"Size still matters," Institute President Adrian Lund said in a statement. "Though much safer than they were a few years ago, minicars as a group do a comparatively poor job of protecting people in crashes."
To bolster that point, the Institute says the 2007 death rate for minicars was substantially higher than those for larger cars - from nearly twice as high to more than three times greater, depending on the type of crack-up.
These latest crash results should spark a debate about how government regulators go about mandating tougher fuel economy standards without any consideration at all for safety. The quickest and surest way to improve fuel economy is to downsize the side of vehicles. But at these latest tests show, smaller vehicles are not necessarily as safe as larger ones.
Yet with the tougher fleet-wide fuel economy rules being adopted in Canada and the U.S., nowhere have we seen an honest discussion about safety. In a nutshell, all things being equal, bigger is safer than smaller. So as long as roads in Canada and the U.S. are populated with a mish-mash of different sized vehicles, those in the little rides are more at risk, though greener.
Two obvious thoughts come to mind. First, over time, as the fuel rules get stiffer and stiffer, most drivers will migrate to smaller vehicles and that alone will mitigate some of the problem. Still, unless we ban big vehicles entirely from our roads, there will always be some mismatched collisions.
It seems highly unlikely that we'll lose 18-wheelers from our highways anytime soon. The same for dump trucks and buses and the like. And no government is likely to ban SUVs and pickups entirely, either. They are still needed by contractors and so on, not to mention owners who tow boats and trailers.
So that leaves a couple of other options. Governments could mandate tougher, more robust small cars. However, engineering small vehicles to match big ones in a head-to-head smashup costs money, thus small car prices would rise under that scenario. Consumers and voters won't like that.
The Insurance Institute, for its part, says buyers should get larger cars with superior safety to minis and micros. Their view is that the newest midsize cars get similar fuel economy to many smaller cars.
That is true. I've written about this in the past year in the Globe, though my focus was more on the negligible fuel economy benefits of small runabouts versus the more fuel-efficient, four-cylinder versions of midsize sedans.
Somewhere in this debate we have auto makers. They are pressed to build and sell smaller, highly fuel efficient cars to meet the coming extremely strict fuel economy standards. Test results like these announced today don't help their cause.
Smart USA president Dave Schembri sent out a statement saying the collision test was so severe, it "is unlikely to occur in real world crashes. Smart has a proven track record of safety with approximately one million cars on the road in 37 countries."
Smart's talking, but not a word from our policy-makers, regulators or politicians.