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Americans Deserve Vehicles That Are Both Safe and Clean Detroit opposes CAFE standards, claiming that they cannot make a safe, clean SUV. Contrary to the auto industry's arguments, CAFE standards don't dictate automobile size or safety. Design, not weight, is the key to both safety and fuel economy. Engineering and safety features like airbags and crush-resistant roofs can ensure that vehicles absorb crash forces so occupants don't. Crash-test results show that automakers are making safe and unsafe cars of all sizes. In a standard head-on crash test into a wall, occupants of a 1997 Ford Expedition faced greater risk of injury or death than occupants of a 1997 Saturn subcompact. This is because the Saturn has crashworthiness designed into it and the Expedition does not.
The same industry claimed the original CAFE law was a threat to highway safety, battled automotive safety improvements from seatbelts to airbags and continues to fight a rollover standard. The fact is that since 1975 CAFE standards doubled fuel economy and the rate of highway fatalities fell by 50 percent. The SUV Safety Story: Rollovers and Dangers to Others on the Road Here's what the New York Times said about SUV safety (July 15, 1999): "Because it is taller, heavier and more rigid, an SUV or a pickup is more than twice as likely as a car to kill the driver of the other vehicle in a collision. Yet partly because these so-called light trucks roll over so often, their occupants have roughly the same chance as car occupants of dying in a crash." SUVs give a false impression of safety. With their height and comparatively narrow tire-track width, SUVs handle and maneuver much less effectively than cars. Emergency swerves to avoid a crash can themselves lead to rollover accidents in SUVs, which are four times more likely to roll over in an accident. Rollovers account for 62 percent of SUV deaths but only 22 percent in cars. Yet automakers continue to fight new standards that would protect occupants in rollover accidents. Because SUVs are built on high, stiff frames, their bumpers ride above the occupant-protecting frame of cars. When an SUV and a car collide, this height difference, combined with the stiff battering-ram frame and greater mass, create a lethal weapon. According to a government study, in 1996 "at least 2,000 car occupants would not have been killed, had their cars collided with other cars instead of trucks of the same weight." And SUVs are also more deadly to pedestrians, bicyclists and motorcyclists than cars, in part because existing braking standards for SUVs are weaker than for cars. The
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