Common Urban Myths About Transport

Myth: Small cars are unsafe and should be avoided

Fact: Some (but not all) small cars increase your chances of being injured if you're in a crash. But they don't make you any more likely to crash, and might even make you less likely. The best way to minimise your risk of being injured is to drive less.

A reader would take away the conclusion that all small cars are uncrashworthy: a conclusion that's falsified by Dr Newstead's own research. For a start, you have to read carefully to notice that Newstead is only referring to cars in the 'light' vehicle category and not those in the 'small' vehicle category. For example the popular Toyota Corolla, despite being considered 'ultracompact' in the USA, is classified as a 'small' car in the Monash study, and all Corolla models produced since 1994 rate better than the all-model average.

Even among 'light' cars four models (Daewoo 1.5i, Ford Ka, Kia Rio and Volkswagen Polo) had crashworthiness scores better than the all-model average in 2006, despite Dr Newstead's comments to The Age. The researchers declined to give a 'better than average' rating to these models because the favourable scores were deemed not statistically significant, in part because the models were under-represented in the crash data.

Stuart Newstead said small cars were not a safe bet when it came to crash worthiness. No light cars had crash worthiness better than average and of 37 light cars, more than half scored in the worst possible rating, Dr Newstead said. Buyers need to think carefully about a purchase in this class, especially young drivers who have a high crash risk and old drivers who are more susceptible to injury.

Rising fuel prices are also a factor, with some buyers opting for a smaller car believing them to be more economical. People need to be very conscious of the safety issue: you might save yourself a couple of extra dollars a week but what's your life worth?

Other models also have crashworthiness ratings at the low or high end of the scale, but their confidence limits overlap the all model average. Although such models may also have superior or inferior crashworthiness characteristics, the database did not contain sufficient numbers of these models for the data to represent scientific evidence that this is the case.

The tests did not involve the much ballyhooed mismatches between subcompacts and Hummers, but measured the effect of relatively modest differences in size and weight. Even though the Smart car and other minis such as the Honda Fit and the Toyota Yaris have fared relatively well in single-car crash tests, they performed poorly in these two-car frontal offset collisions. In the words of IIHS president Adrian Lund, "though much safer than they were a few years ago, minicars as a group do a comparatively poor job of protecting people in crashes, simply because they're smaller and lighter."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXunnaaYtz0

it is test of small cars on safety.

Small cars don't crash themselves, do they? It doesn't matter if you're driving a small car or an SUV, if you're being irresponsible on the road then of course you are likely to crash. Whilst I acknowledge that some cars may be safer than others in a crash, it is most likely the driver that is the problem. Banning the production of small cars would not decrease the amount of crashes.

No, but I think we need to put small cars in perspective. A lot of small cars sold in the U.S. market are re-branded "city cars" sold in the European and Japanese markets. They were never designed for the road-centric American society where large commerical vehicles and SUVs much larger than in those markets dominate highways. I think that they can still be safely operated on highways, but perhaps there need to be some restrictions on where they can be operated or or even move to a less road-dependent economy...just something that alters incentives in favor of small car ownership.

Here, let's try this:

"The production of infant babies has been shown to increase the number of deaths of humans (eventually) in a ratio of exactly 1 to 1. Therefore to decrease the number of deaths of humans (to zero in fact) we must stop producing these tiny little human infants."

Kinda like that argument?

Lets conclude this topic! We have got another way of avowing this problem we can stop the producing of big cars. I think this way is better, but not comfortable.