[QUOTE]Originally posted by gregstevens
[B]I did a very informal survey in my 28 mile commute to western surburbia this morning and I found none of the behemoth-style

 

[QUOTE]Originally posted by Luder94
[B][QUOTE]Originally posted by gregstevens
[b]I did a very informal survey in my 28 mile commute to western surburbia this morning and I found none of the behemoth-style

 

That reminds me of something that happened to me about 6 years ago. I was involved in a rollover wreck in which I was almost killed, on life support, the whole nine yards. It took me more than two full years to recover, after surgeries, an iliac crest bone graft, broken bones, a scalp that had been lacerated so badly the doctors didn

 

Ooooh Greg, ouch...... Sorry to hear that you had to go through that man.

My guess here is, "What doesn't kill you...." You know the rest. If you had never said anything, I would have never noticed.

I'm more glad now than I was before that I have had the chance to meet you. Hope your health is going good for you now.

BTW, check out the gallery pages.


I know this is off topic from the thread, but I told you guys that I wasn't going to comment my opinions on this further

 

You people just don't get it... Greg you are in denial. The only reason you survived (and we have talked about it, that was a miracle) is because it was a car you were in -- with a unibody. If you had flipped an SUV, you would not be here to have this discussion.

In a unibody car, the roof is part of the frame of the vehicle, and therefore very rigid. In an SUV there is a ladder frame, and the roof/pillars only function is to keep the elements out. THERE IS NO BUILT IN ROLL PROTECTION.

Sev brought up the point that the one I posted earlier flipped into a tree, and that's true. I posted the most gruesome one I could find. But here is one from a 'normal' rollover:



Again, not a suvivable accident. And it only flipped once onto the roof. This was off the first page of 10 out of 119, and each page of 10 included at least 6 flips. Let me repeat. 1/218 Accords on the same site had flipped. So not only do SUV's flip more often, they do so with more grave consequences. Those of you who are not accepting this are lying to yourselves. The types of statistics I found are not a fluke. One car parts site, 119 Expeditions and 218 Accords. 56% of Expeditions had flipped, and .4% of Accords had flipped. If you don't see the trend, I pity you. And 71% of Xterras had flipped... just because it's smaller doesn't mean it's not unstable:


My advice to anyone that needs the space is buy a Station wagon, and if you need foul weather capability get an AWD station wagon. I couldn't put my family into one of these vehicles after learning what I learned researching for this thread. Thank you Greg, you may have saved a life or two by bringing our attention to this. The more I dig into this, the more I'm finding that this is a bigger problem than I had thought. These things are just plain unsafe. The NTSB tests for front and side impact, they need to impose rollover protection measures for these vehicles... with millions of them hitting the road yearly, more and more people are going to die. I hate to be morbid about this, but it doesn't look good. If you can avoid driving one of these, please avoid it... not for my sake, for your own.

 

Ummmmm, no...I'm not in denial and it is actually rude of you to say that I am. I was simply stating the fact that I have rolled a CAR and NOT an SUV. Not that I have plans ever to do that again, but MY track record is that MY SUV is 100% UNROLLED. And the only time I have rolled a vehicle was a CAR. I wasn't saying ANYTHING about survivabilty. I think you are a little hung up on that. I didn't mention anything about surviving it were I in an SUV instead of Louise, my Integra. In fact, when this has come up before, I give that little Integra a ton of kudos for saving my life. I have never even considered nor have I CARED what MAY have happened were I in another vehicle. In fact, that has never even crossed my mind...I just don't care!

People have their opinions, and that's fine...people have what they consider facts, and that's fine too. But I think it's very difficult to assess what happened in an accident simply by looking at the aftermath of it in a junkyard. It's really impossible to do so. Sad and unfortunate things, to be sure, but drawing too many conclusions from lobbies/sites/pictures that may or may not have an agenda against a particular kind of vehicle is probably not the best approach to a reasoned argument. Everyone has an axe and they all like to grind it from time to time. And the anti-SUV lobby has done a very effective job at blaming SUV's when it's really the idiots who are driving them that are the real problem. It's nothing more complicated than that...idiots are the problem.

I don't care how the thing is made, unibody or not, it doesn't matter to me. I do know that in 'normal' accidents that people get into on a day to day basis, SUV's ARE safer than the average passenger car. Rollovers, which seem to have developed into a fascination of yours lately , could be another story. All cars rollover and I wish that that would never happen to anyone, but survivability is difficult regardless of the vehicle. I was within millimeters of death, as the depth of the laceration on the top of my head were through the bone and almost to my brain. So it's really impossible to ascribe survivability rates when the margin is so minute.

Of course you can say that you don't care HOW the wreck happened, just that these pictures show how the SUV handled the rollover...and that's fine and maybe a valid point. But the fact is that an idiot caused this, most likely IMO and idiots are the root of all evil...also, IMO.

Happy motoring...

 

Jason, I was under the impression that an SUV like the Acura MDX, for example, is a unibody design. How does this factor into your equation?

 

I read a series of news articles a year or two ago about the effects of SUVs on other cars in accidents. The gist was that the SUV bumpers were so high that they were above the designed impact zones of passenger cars, making them much much more likely to kill anyone that they hit. I believe that the original study was done by the National Highway Traffic Safety folks or the the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. There was some further grumbling about some insurance companies raising rates on SUVs to compensate for larger medical bills that they caused.

Do greg and the other SUV owners disagree with the following statements?
1) Drivers of SUVs are more likely to drive aggressively, knowing that they are unlikely to be hurt in a normal accident (no rollover) with the passenger cars around them.
2) It is reasonable for drivers of small cars to fear an aggressively driven SUV, since they are likely to be hurt/killed if there is an accident.
3) The sheer size of many SUVs makes driving more difficult and dangerous for other drivers, since it is difficult to see around them. If you are following a car, you can see brake lights ahead of that car and prepare for speed changes; with an SUV in front of you, all you can do is react to break lights on/off.
4) The size and design of large SUVs limit the driver's ability to see behind them and in the rear quarter panel blind spots, making SUVs more likely to cause small parking lot accidents.

These four statements seem like common sense to me. If you do agree with any them, then you should also understand why there is some hostility towards SUVs.

I will state for the record that RAV4s, CRVs, and some of the other small SUVs are not a problem. They do limit vision, but I never see them being hotrodded down city streets.

P.S. -- The first 4 vehicles to try to race me were all SUVs. The fifth was a large pickup.
P.P.S. -- I still haven't raced anyone, anywhere.

 

Greg's last post seems to be consistent with the attitude of most SUV owners: It's bigger and heavier than a passenger car, therefore it's safer for ME. It's a selfish attitude and ignores the obvious logical flaw that if EVERYONE adopted that attitude then we'd all be driving big heavy boats which would actually make the roads LESS safe for everyone as opposed to safer (so they believe) for the smaller proportion of SUV drivers that exist today. This attitude also ignores the fact that since there are more and more SUV's on the road the probability of an accident with another SUV is going up daily. I hope even Greg will admit that an accident, even the daily routine type, between two 4500 lb. vehicles is going to be worse than the same accident between two 3000 lb vehicles. This all seems like common sense to me but SUV owners are like smokers. They want their "right" to drive whatever vehicle they choose, no matter how that choice affects others.

 

I apologize if it came across that way, you know I wouldn't be rude to you especially in regard to such a sensitive incident in your life. I meant no harm... I just feel you are, for some reason that escapes me, avoiding facts here. Your experience is not a factor, as it happened in the past and any speculation of what could have happened is not important here. I'm just glad you made it so I got the chance to meet you... that trip to Knoxville wouldn't have been the same without you!

Quote:

Sad and unfortunate things, to be sure, but drawing too many conclusions from lobbies/sites/pictures that may or may not have an agenda against a particular kind of vehicle is probably not the best approach to a reasoned argument

The pictures I posted are from an auto parts site. They have no agenda with respect to SUVs, they post pictures for prospective auto parts buyers. I simply scrolled through the pictures of the vehicles. I looked at 467 pictures. I saw 92 flipped vehicles with extensive and intrusive roof damage. Of those, only 1 was a car. 1 out of 467 wrecked, totalled vehicles was a car with extensive roof damage. I saw many cars with superficial roof damage. Out of 467 vehicles, I saw 91 SUV's with extensive, intrusive roof damage. If those numbers don't tell a story, I don't know what does. In my mind they speak for themselves. And the nature of the sample group is fair and impartial.

SUV'S FLIP MORE OFTEN THAN CARS, AND WITH FAR GRAVER CONSEQUENCES. That is what the above numbers reveal.

[B][QUOTE]
Rollovers, which seem to have developed into a fascination of yours lately , could be another story.