Most Small Cars Are Unsafe for Backseat Passengers: IIHS | Hacker News Reader

Most Small Cars Are Unsafe for Backseat Passengers: IIHS

thedrive.com

31 pointsjosephcsible40 comments

This a strange framing, because the implication is that small cars are much less safe than others. But this article doesn't mention anything at all about SUVs/trucks. A quick search shows multiple articles saying that all types of cars/SUVs/trucks are doing pretty poorly with this new test on average.

Many Popular SUVs Lag Behind in Rear Seat Safety, New Crash Tests Show https://www.consumerreports.org/cars/car-safety/many-popular...

Very large 3-row SUVs might do better on this new test, but I can't actually find many examples. Rivian R1S Is the Only Large SUV To Earn Top Safety Pick+ Award From IIHS https://www.autoevolution.com/news/rivian-r1s-is-the-only-la...

Crash test/safety ratings are useless for comparing across vehicle classes.

Generally speaking smaller cars are the loser when it comes to collisions, if the other vehicle is larger/heavier. Even if both sides have best-in-class safety scores.

I'm pretty sure those results can only be compared across vehicles of the same class. As in, a bigger car can get a poor rating while still being better than a smaller car with a good rating.

Crash test results in the U.S. are ranked relative to other vehicles of roughly the same size. They aren't measured on an absolute scale.

On the other han, euro crash tests are absolute (as far as I know). You can see the decrease in safety in smaller car models, down to which part of the body is getting crashed in which type of collision in a smaller car, but is intact in a larger car.

Euro crash tests include large weighted components of safety to others outside the car.

So it's totally possible for a car more safe then another for its passengers, in all conditions, to be nonetheless ranked lower because of lower pedestrian safety or something.

You can also check out how the car does in specific tests. So, if you want to ignore risk to pedestrians, you can.

The Civic and Corolla account for most of the U.S. sales of the five listed cars and they get "good" across the board on the rear-seat passenger injury, so the headline appears to be false. Most small cars are safe for passengers in the back seat, while many models are not.

Note that the title is misleading.

The issue is lack of seatbelt pre-tensioning, not the size of car.

I am surprised manufacturers are not required to have pretensioners.

> The issue is lack of seatbelt pre-tensioning, not the size of car.

Also, your face is hitting something other than an airbag. The size of the car is probably somewhat to blame - larger cars have more space for your head to move before smashing into something.

Should we be putting airbags into the back of the front seats now? How much would that cost? You'd think that much of the electronics have already been taken care of due to the presence of the other airbags. Add some weight sensors in the seats, something to detect if the LATCH system is in use, etc. Would this be a few hundred dollars, or much much more?

‘Small cars’? The Toyota Corolla is like the go-to example model for a ‘midsize’ when you’re renting a car. Subaru Crosstrek is a midsize crossover.

The corolla was a small car. In the 90s. Not any longer

Seems to be a trend. Not sure if someone's already coined a term for it, but I've noticed that with each revision, each model of car tends to get a little bigger, a little roomier, etc. Over time they grow - after all, nobody wants to say that last year's model had more legroom and whatnot. Soon, there's no such thing as a small car in the lineup, and a new model is introduced at the bottom, repeating the process.

Nah; a Corolla is an "intermediate": compact < intermediate < standard < full-size.

This brings up an old bugbear of mine. The front seat airbag thing is a solvable problem but instead of solving it, we just choose to put kids in the back seat because that's cheaper for the auto manufacturers. This is obviously true since 2-seaters allow kids in the front seat.

I think having your kid in the back seat is a far worse experience for both the parent and the kid, and there has been an increase in "hot car deaths" since the laws requiring kids to be in the back seat passed.

My favorite was my 2007 Ford Ranger regular cab pick up truck with just the one row of seata, which had a presumably mandatory visor safety sticker saying the back seat is the safest place for children. It had a weight sensor for the front passenger seat and wouldn't arm the airbag unless a weighty enough passenger was present. You could get a factory approved switch if that wasn't good enough, but then you need to remember to check it and switch it as appropriate for the passenger.

Generally you can switch off the front passenger airbag.

We have to buy seat boosters, just because auto manufacturers can't make seat belts adjustable for kids.

You shouldn’t be downvoted. This is true. (Some legal booster seats don’t even boost the kid, they just readjust the seatbelt. It’d be very low cost to make manufacturers do this at the factory, and it’d drastically reduce the hassle of having kids in the car.)

Notably these are common models to be Uber passengers in, so I hope the involved companies can get better seatbelt pre-tensioners in the back, which is a minimal expense for much better safety ratings.

Are you imagining that anyone involved in ride-sharing is going to retrofit different seatbelt tech to existing cars?

I’d imagine that better safety ratings would sway some new car buyers with kids to buy cars equipped with better tech for them. I doubt ride-sharing will motivate anything on the new car side and am even more sure nothing will change in the existing fleet.

> Are you imagining that anyone involved in ride-sharing is going to retrofit different seatbelt tech to existing car?

Not the parent, but I wouldn't imagine that. However most unlicensed taxi services require fairly new vehicles (as do many taxi licensing regimes). If the manufacturers put in better pre-tensioning in their future model years, it won't be long before taxis have them.

Those are small cars in the US. In Europe and South America, there are a lot of cars a lot smaller than those. I have a friend who had a Volkswagen Up. Once I went on a trip together with him and his girlfriend using this car. I almost had a claustrophobic crisis in the backseat. It is scary, you feel like you're being buried alive. Should we have crashed, I am pretty certain I would not have survived.

I always thought backseats were way safer than front seats. Is that no longer the case? Or was it never the case?

That was maybe the case before crumple zones were added to the front.

I thought there were crumple zones in the back too, though.

Obviously it makes a big difference whether you're hit from the front or from the back. As cars usually go forward, they're more likely to hit something in front of them.

The test was testing front collision and in that the rear seats were less safe. That's extremely surprising to me.

It kind of makes sense? The seat in front is a fairly hard surface. Front passengers hit airbags.

Yes, that's why the newest S class models have rear seat airbags mounted on the centre console/back of front seats.

If I go directly to the IIHS website, I don't see any of this data. Anyone know where it is?

I think only a narrow side of luxury vehicles even think about backseat passengers.

The day has finally arrived. Mandatory car seats for all ages!

Solution: make cars even smaller by removing back seats.

The strange thing in this is that I was always in the back seat of Ubers to be safer.

Now it looks like I should pick front seat when airbags are available.

All cars are unsafe.

I'd argue it's just the stupidly large trucks and SUVs that plague the road ways.

You could argue that but you’d be wrong. Several thousand pounds at 20+ mph is unsafe no matter how you slice it.

We need to get back to horse carts.

why not get forward to trains, cycling and busses?

I know someone whose mom died in a horse cart accident.

Horses themselves are extremely dangerous.

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