Sally Murray's article on rates of global injury and violence1 highlights the role of traffic-related injury and death. In discussions of traffic injuries, there is a tendency to use SUVs as scapegoats for increased risk to other road users and pedestrians because of incompatibilities between SUVs and other vehicles in terms of height, weight and frame geometry. This heightened risk is well known and is of even greater magnitude for full-sized trucks and vans.2,3
However, a rapid evolution is under way in the design of SUVs, from obsolete body-on-frame construction to unibody designs, resulting in benefits to occupants in handling and ride quality. It is likely that these new designs also decrease the risk to other road users, although perhaps unintentionally.
Until the recent arrival of the Honda Ridgeline, no light trucks have used unibody technology. All other vehicles in the light-truck category retain conventional body-on-frame designs, which align stiff longitudinal steel members with the head and upper torso of car occupants. This design, in combination with non-independent rear suspension, a recent trend to increasing frame height and the attraction that light trucks hold for aggressive young male drivers, renders these vehicles lethal.
Currently, collision data are assembled by lumping data for disparate frame designs into categories that describe external appearance better than internal construction. Much research remains to be done before the effect of frame construction can be quantified.4
Wider recognition of the relative risks posed by specific vehicles and frame types to other vehicles, cyclists and pedestrians is sorely needed. The external costs in terms of population morbidity and mortality are too great for collision incompatibility issues to continue to go unregulated.
Footnotes
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Competing interests: None declared.