Smaller isn’t unsafe-er

You hear it all the time: “I drive a big SUV because it’s safer.” Wrong. Smaller does not mean unsafe-er. The 9-foot long Smart scored the highest marks in front and side impact tests conducted by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. I went over to their website to see how big 19-foot utes fared; and it appears as if they haven’t been tested.

GroupFear has so many Americans convinced that a small car isn’t safe, cars cheaper than the Smart for the USDM aren’t looking too likely in the near future. The Smart is a boutique, niche, fringe vehicle only, and costs way too much for its size. However, the very fact Smarts are as safe as cars twice their size is due to the engineering that jacks up the price. The Chinese ripoff of the Smart would likely fail the IIHS test miserably, because it only looks like a Smart.

Nissan wants to sell an electric minicar in the US in the next decade. Its success depends upon how much greater demand for small cars will be. By the next decade, gas prices may well be double what they are now, and it appears the only thing to break the old GroupFear assertion of small=death will be the thousands more dollars a big SUV will cost to fuel up.

The situation on American roads is that big SUVs, while no safer than small cars, are so plentiful, they influence the psychological evaluation of a potential auto buyer. How will a Smart or Fit or Cube or Micra survive amongst all those big bad SUVs, to say nothing of all the road rage (name-brand pharmaceutical pending)?

There’s also the little thing about Smarts and their ilk looking goofy/uncool/ugly, etc., while trucks still look goofy/uncool/ugly, but in a totally different and more socially acceptable way.