It's the "let's defect in a prisoner's dilemma" strategy that works great until others use it too.
It's a shame. The pedestrians will have to find a way to get taller too.
For crying out loud, people, I know it's stupid, I know it's wrong, but it's the truth. It's an uncomfortable truth that your downvoting will not change.
When you all have big cars, you're back in an equilibrium where everyone seems as safe in head-on collisions as the equilibrium where everyone drove small cars. But each car now has way more kinetic energy and momentum, and needs bigger crumple zones to absorb it (oops! You won't find room to expand those in side collisions!), is more prone to rollover, has less visibility of pedestrians, bicycles, and children playing in your driveway, worse gas mileage, more pollution, less parking space, etc.
And then someone decides to get an edge over the crowd by driving a monster truck and you're back to scrambling into a new, even worse equilibrium.
All the pedestrians and cyclists they mow down are less safe though.
And everything becomes more polluted, which is presumably also not equally safe.
First: there's vehicle-to-barrier crashes (think trees, etc):
Having a vehicle with a large well-designed crumple zone seems obviously good from a survivability POV.
Second: there's vehicle-to-vehicle crashes:
Is it really a zero-sum game? If a small car crashes head on with a large car, will the people in the small car suffer worse than if they crashed into another small car? To what degree?
This is hypothetical; I don't know what real numbers from real collisions are like, but light cars are definitely at a disadvantage in that they can get knocked around a lot more. There's also the possibility of a light car getting pinned between a heavy car and an immovable object or another heavy car.
I don't think this is zero-sum: ideally, we'd all be driving around in large bubbles that weigh 200 pounds or less and have huge crush zones filled with styrofoam or something.
Well it's zero sum in the linear sense as the relative total velocity change is the same, but crash survivability isn't linear. Rather, it decreases exponentially, since kinetic energy is proportional to the square of velocity - so a head-on crash between a semi and a compact car subjects the occupants of the compact car to nearly 4x the force that they'd be subjected to if they crashed into another compact car.
However, please read what I wrote here:
I guess what I was looking for was actual data, not assumptions.