The tragic death of South African pop star Lebo Mathosa, after her 4×4 rolled over several times, serves as an apt opportunity to review the myth of SUV safety.

I won’t get into the damage that 4×4s and their emissions do to the environment. No one buys one of these vehicles for the sake of the earth. Nor can I argue with those who find driving an SUV to be psychologically necessary.

According to an article in the New Yorker on SUVs:

… internal [auto] industry market research concluded that S.U.V.s tend to be bought by people who are insecure, vain, self-centered, and self-absorbed, who are frequently nervous about their marriages, and who lack confidence in their driving skills.

There’s not much more I can add to that.

I do acknowledge that there are people who regularly drive on roads that are not passable in normal 2-wheel-drive sedan cars. I just hope that they leave their 4×4 vehicles in the garage as much as possible when they get back to town.

What worries me, though, is that some people are buying 4×4s under the illusion that they are safer than cars. Because they are large and high, they feel safe, but those same characteristics give them the disadvantage when it comes to steering, braking and rolling over.

The definitive work on the subject is a book by Keith Bradsher, “High and Mighty: SUVs: The World’s Most Dangerous Vehicles and How They Got That Way.” A review of Bradsher’s book in the Economist magazine says that SUVs:

… have a kill rate at least three times higher than cars. Poor driving dynamics make them liable to roll over: around 12,000 Americans were killed in SUV roll-overs during the 1990s.

Anyone buying an SUV to haul around their kids should know about a study released this year looking at 4,000 children involved crashes of SUVs and cars. Here are some quotes on the study from the New York Times:

“Our sense was that most people have been assuming [SUVs] were safer and, frankly, we were, too,” said the senior author of the study, Dr. Dennis R. Durbin of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia . . .

. . . But with S.U.V.’s, the new study reports, whatever benefits that come with the added weight are erased by the higher risk of rolling over . . .

. . . While rolling over is a danger for both kinds of vehicles, rollovers occurred twice as often in S.U.V.’s, the study found, and children were three times as likely to be injured in rollovers than in other kinds of accidents.

Even if the vehicle does not roll over, many SUVs are built with a rigid design that makes them more dangerous in a crash. The New Yorker article, by Malcolm Gladwell, makes a telling comparison, though it unfortunately does not use South African vehicles in the example:

In a thirty-five m.p.h. crash test, for instance, the driver of a Cadillac Escalade—the G.M. counterpart to the Lincoln Navigator [a large 4x4]—has a sixteen-percent chance of a life-threatening head injury, a twenty percent chance of a life-threatening chest injury, and a thirty-five-percent chance of a leg injury. The same numbers in a Ford Windstar minivan—a vehicle engineered from the ground up, as opposed to simply being bolted onto a pickup-truck frame—are, respectively, two per cent, four per cent, and one per cent.

Why all the quotes from American and European publications? I simply do not see much written about this issue in South Africa. The myth of 4×4 safety is still strong here. The tragedy is the number of people, perhaps including Lebo Mathosa, who thought they were doing themselves a favour by buying a 4×4, who felt safe and secure right up until the moment of their death.