“Crash tests show small car ratings are misleading” by James Healey

With the gas crisis easing up its grip on the wallets of the average American, consumers have been able to take a few breaths of relief compared to about this same time last year. However, the sudden spike in the price of oil left a perpetual influence on the way Americans look at car-buying.
The article begins by stating that buyers who choose small vehicles could be endangering themselves according to new research. It further explains that in a new study, performed by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, small cars that earned a “good” safety rating in barrier test, earned a “poor” rating in new tests. In some tests, much of the interior of some of these micro-transporters was reported to have been completely shoved into the test dummy from head to foot. This leaves many consumers alarmed and rethinking the importance of saving an extra 5 mpg. While cars that are categorized into “small cars” may have increased in sales the past few years, the rise of a safety issue may have quite the opposite affect. In nearly all of the safety tests where a smaller car was tested in a collision with a larger car, the test dummy in the smaller car suffered severe injuries compared to the larger car. This led many experts to come to the conclusion that the smaller the car, the higher the risk of death in a collision. This has left many different opinions from both small and large car-buyers.
While crash-test ratings show larger cars having the advantage when it comes to safety, many small-car-defenders claim that it is not the size of the car that the issue of safety concerns, it is the driver. Larger car buyers support the fact that everything goes back to physics; despite the safety features of a car, the larger size carries an advantage when it comes to collisions. However, the support of large cars also brings with it the support of lower gas mileage and thus greater consumption of our natural resources.
The new study has left me with mixed feelings. While most people find caring for our environment to be important, many people, including myself, find safety to be of greater importance. Also, the fact that American consumers were being misled to some degree is another alarming fact. By giving certain cars a “good” safety rating, many consumers were misled into believing that a car they were buying is safe when, in reality, it is extremely unsafe. This leads me to believe that giving new safety ratings to some vehicles will not be the end of this headline. The concern of victims of car-crashes whose vehicles took part in this study is yet to be seen and the battle between insurance companies and car companies over the new study has only begun to brew.
Another question this new study poses is this: just what else have consumers been misled to believe due to poor research and misleading titles? Also, who is to blame for these shortcomings of our expectations? The IIHS or the car companies themselves? What kind of reactions will we see from people who have just spent their hard-earned cash on a hazardous mode of transportation in a wallet-squeezing economy? Only time will tell, but one question can be answered for sure: this certainly will not be the last we hear of poor crash-test ratings from these smaller cars. While the article was short, I enjoyed reading it because it enlightened me of new information that will soon become very crucial to me as I buy my first car in the coming months.