Safety Group Walks Back Advice to Let Risky Teens Drive Megacars
A top safety organization is recommending that parents put their teen drivers in larger cars that are safer for occupants but more lethal for pedestrians and cyclists — and sparking a backlash about why it seems to be enlisting the youngest drivers in the SUV arms race rather than demanding that cars be made smaller and safer for everyone.
In honor of Teen Driver Safety Week, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety recently revisited its August study about the role of vehicle design in protecting the youngest motorists on our roads, which found that U.S. teens “are the riskiest drivers,” but “drive the least-safe vehicles” — i.e. smaller cars.
Those cars, though, are actually among the safest on the road … for people who walk and roll. Studies have long shown that megacars are two to three times more likely than a sedan to kill a walker in the event of a crash, and today’s hulking SUVs are a staggering eight times more likely to kill a child who isn’t behind the wheel.
Nonetheless, the Institute expressed concern that the proportion of teens driving older, smaller automobiles hadn’t gone down since 2008, and recommended that parents explore buying their kids newer and bigger models with better occupant safety ratings — prompting transportation researcher David Zipper to ask whether “pedestrian and cyclist deaths … count” towards the organization’s mission to reduce car crash deaths.
Notably, the Institute’s report did not mention that teens already represent the single age demographic that’s most likely to kill a vulnerable road user, even though teens are currently among the least likely to drive the kind of large cars that are deadliest to people outside the vehicle.
The Institute may well be right that parents’ best bet to keep their children safe may be to put them in the biggest, most heavily-armored car they can afford, at least as long as America remains as car dependent and SUV-dominated as it is today. But for those who can’t or don’t want to choose a vehicle that’s more likely to kill other people’s babies, some advocates hope that regulators will take action to address the root reason why we need a Teen Driver Safety Week at all: a society that gives young people few truly safe choices, no matter how they get around.
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