Dan, we would both die: you would flatten my car to a pancake and then flip over five times.
Seriously, no matter how well a car may be reinforced and designed to withstand crashes, the heavier object almost always wins. That's why these SUV's are so lethal: they are higher up off the ground--the frames and bumpers don't match with the cars, so you cave in my car body instead of hitting my frame, and the one or two thousand pounds extra weight is a killer. Force = mass x acceleration. Goodbye. In SUV-car crashes the people who die are usually in the car. The only real way to protect yourself from an SUV is to get one yourself. (But in SUV-SUV collisions the weights cancel and you both flip over and die.) So, you can look at that and say, I'm the smart one, I win, I'm high up in that SUV and have all that extra steel around me, or you can say that a more socially responsible (caring?, even, dare I say, Christian?) position would be that the majority of non-industrial vehicles should be in some reasonable range of each other in weight and match in height of frame so that collisions are less lethal. But the SUV's do flip over a lot--it's their high center of gravity--and one recent study found that for the SUV driver the casualty rate from flipping actually cancels out, statistically, the benefits gained from the size and weight. See those websites I posted for the facts.
Meanwhile, be careful out there with that thing--that Suburban is a lethal weapon. |
