Used vehicle safety study begs a lot of questions

Warning, boredom ahead. Mention terms such as 'statistical analysis' 'random sampling' or 'standard deviation' and prepare for the eyes to glaze over.

Many people find polls and surveys to be a crashing bore, so it's refreshing to find a report on vehicular passive safety that's a crashing eye-opener.

Compiled by the Monash University Accident Research Centre (MUARC) with help from Royal Automobile Club of Victoria (RACV) and various state and federal government transport departments, the report assesses the relative safety of different used cars involved in accidents and also determines the harm they might do to other road users in an accident.

To establish the raw data for the report, MUARC surveyed 2.8 million crashes involving 279 different categories of car in Australia and New Zealand for the period 1987 to 2005.

The TAC has welcomed the report, declaring that it could influence future used vehicle purchasing decisions and cut the road toll by one third.

"We know that purchasing safer vehicles can potentially reduce the road toll by a third, so that's a hundred fewer deaths, 2000 fewer serious injuries every year," TAC road safety senior manager David Healy said.

On the face of it, the used cars to avoid are most cars built during the late eighties.

The vast majority of large SUVs in the study were catastrophically bad in respect of harm to other road users, but did tend to keep occupants safer.

There seems to be a correlation in older vehicles between mass and the degree of injury to other road users. Modern cars are designed with bonnets that crumple under the weight of a pedestrian, for example, and are safer, irrespective of their size.

According to the report, cars from the eighties that were smaller and lighter were often less capable of protecting occupants than larger cars, but the larger cars were also more likely to harm other road users than the smaller cars were.

The report throws up some anomalies that cannot be adequately explained, unless one questions the research method used.

According to the report, the Daewoo Kalos and Lanos are less safe than both the older Cielo and much smaller Matiz.

The VU Ute was not as safe for occupants as the later VY/VZ models, but the latter must have all been fitted with bullbars for the study, since they rated way worse for other road users.

XF and XG Falcon/Nissan Utes rated slightly better for occupant protection than the XE/XF Falcon sedans and wagons.

Perhaps, as is the case with many such studies, it's wisest to draw just the broadest of conclusions from the data presented.

You can read the report in tabular format here.

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