NYT: Is the Car Unsafe, or the Driver? (Highway Safety report questioned)

[DeepModem Mom]

Is the Car Unsafe, or the Driver?
By DANNY HAKIM
Published: March 15, 2005


DETROIT, March 14 - One way of reading the new report by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety is that the Mercedes E-Class sedan has the safest design of any car or truck and the two-door Chevrolet Blazer the worst.

Another way to read the report, to be released Tuesday, is that E-Class drivers tend to drive more carefully than Blazer drivers....

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....Only relatively popular models were studied and one critical demographic adjustment was made. Because female drivers aged 25 to 64 are less likely to be involved in crashes than male drivers, the study considered women of those ages in equal proportions to men, no matter the vehicle. That way, if one kind of vehicle attracted more women buyers than another did, the prevalence of women did not skew the results.

But other personality factors could not be adjusted for, for instance, minivans and stations wagons having low fatality rates both because of their size, which makes for larger crash-absorbing crumple zones, and because of who drives them.

"They tend to be driven by soccer moms and dads," said Adrian Lund, the chief operating officer of the institute. "They tend to be conveying their families and are careful when they are doing that."...

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Alan Adler, manager of safety communications at General Motors, said, "It is impossible in looking at these statistics to know what role driver behavior, such as drunk driving and driving without a safety belt, played in these deaths."...


http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/15/business/15auto.html