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Warren Brown: “SUVs Are Not the Marauding, Murderous Vehicles...Media Have Portrayed Them to Be”

Washington DC June 6, 2005; The AIADA newsletter reported that "the truth, according to a report late last month by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, is that sport-utility vehicles are not the marauding, murderous vehicles that many in the media have portrayed them to be,” Warren Brown writes in his recent column featured in The Detroit News.

IIHS president, Brian O’Neill insisted that the safety officials “should keep this issue of crash incompatibility in perspective and avoid overstating the consequences.” O’Neill said, “The extra risks posed by the incompatibilities between cars and SUVs are real, but it’s important to note that two-vehicle crashes with SUVs aren’t the cause of most car occupant deaths. People riding in cars are far more likely to be killed in single-vehicle crashes than in collisions with SUVs.”

According to IIHS’s analysis of U.S. highway traffic fatalities during years 2002 and 2003 involving vehicles made from 1999 through 2002, “seven percent of the people who were killed in those two-vehicle SUV-car crashes died in cars; but 10 percent of the fatalities occurred in the SUVs.” More than SUVs, Brown says drivers should look at “walls, trees, buildings, soft road shoulders and steep embankments” as bigger threats since single-vehicle crashes account for 42 percent of car deaths studied by IIHS, and 63 percent of SUV fatalities.