MEGA-CAR CRISIS: SUVs Kill Pedestrians, But So Do Blunt-Fronted Sedans, Study Says

The killing power of America’s SUVs and pickup trucks is well documented, but even slightly shorter cars are 26 percent more likely to kill a pedestrian in a crash if they have the SUV-style blunt-faced design that is increasingly popular with automakers, a new study emphasizes.

In a new report issued today, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety reviewed nearly 18,000 fatal crashes involving a single car and a single pedestrian victim and found that tall vehicles have more or less the same high risk of fatalities regardless of design, but medium-height vehicles — i.e. between 30 and 40 inches of height from the street to the top of the hood — had a 25.6-percent higher risk of pedestrian fatality compared with the same-sized cars with low- and sloped front ends.

The simple conclusion? “Manufacturers can make vehicles less dangerous to pedestrians by lowering the front end of the hood and angling the grille and hood to create a sloped profile,” said IIHS Senior Research Transportation Engineer Wen Hu, the lead author of the study. “There’s no functional benefit to these massive, blocky fronts.”

But the key to the study is not that blocky fronts are more likely to cause fatalities, as it has long been known that high and mighty SUVs and pickup trucks are a significant reason for the 80-percent increase in pedestrian deaths over the last 14 years. Virtually all pickup trucks and 56 percent of SUVs are too high or too blunt to be safe for people outside the vehicle. These assault cars are far more deadly because the high front ends are associated with higher risk of head and thorax injuries.

The crucial factor is that cars that Americans think of as “medium sized” also comprise a huge cohort of unsafe cars: nearly 35 percent of those cars are now designed with a blunt — and significantly more deadly — front end, the report said, offering pictures of some of these newly bulky vehicles such as a Ford Mustang:

The same car from 1990 had a lower hood and a sloped front end, archival photos show:

Roughly 7,388 pedestrians were killed in 2021, up from 4,092 in 2009. Over that time, of course, SUVs and pickups became the dominant cars on the road, having tripled in numbers between 2000 and 2019, Streetsblog previously reported.

“Over the past 30 years, the average U.S. passenger vehicle has gotten about four inches wider, 10 inches longer, eight inches taller and 1,000 pounds heavier,” the Insurance Institute added. “Many vehicles are more than 40 inches tall at the leading edge of the hood.”

American auto regulators aren’t doing nearly enough to stop this trend. As Streetsblog reported, megacars account for 75.9 percent of new car sales — a number that’s up from 53 percent a decade ago.