Manufacturers design various safety features to avoid crashes and/or protect you and your passengers if a crash occurs. While most vehicles on the road today have equipment such as anti-lock brakes designed to help you avoid a crash, a variety of new, high-tech devices are in various stages of development and testing.
Millions of crashes involving tens of thousands of deaths occur every year – so it’s critical to select one of the vehicles that are most likely to protect you from death or injury if you should be involved in an accident.
While many factors enter into our decision to select a specific car or vehicle, size is an important consideration. The death rate for occupants of small vehicles is more than double the death rate for occupants of large cars. Finding a car that offers you the most protection while still comfortable with handling the vehicle is a balancing act. If you review the safety ratings of vehicles you will notice that medium and larger vehicles are often rated more highly on safety.
However, vehicles weighing more than 4,500 pounds, such as large SUVs, offer only slightly increased protection for occupants while increasing the injury risks for people in other, smaller cars.
Safety systems to protect you in a crash have come a long way. First we had safety belts and then a single air bag. Today our vehicles have sophisticated engineering to protect us. Our safety system includes a safety belt, seat design and numerous airbags. Each of these components contributes to safety but more importantly they're designed to be used in combination. For instance, not wearing a safety belt in a car that has airbags can be very dangerous and cause the driver to "submarine" under the air bag in the event of a crash.
ESC has already proven to be highly effective. ESC helps drivers maintain control in the worst on-the-road crisis – loss of control at high speed – when the electronic stability control engages automatically to help bring the vehicle back into the intended line of travel. The device aids braking, assists in emergency handling, and improves rollover resistance. ESC lowers the risk of a fatal single car crash by about half, and the risk of a fatal rollover crash by as much as 80 percent!
All new cars have driver and passenger frontal air bags, and most models now offer side air bags as well. Air bags inflate in a fraction of a second, offering excellent protection.
Some vehicles without rear seats, such as pickup trucks and sports cars, have a passenger air bag on-off switch, which allows you to disable the air bag. The air bag should be switched off only if you are transporting a passenger whose age, size or medical condition puts him or her at increased risk for an air-bag-related injury. (Children under the age of 13 should always ride in the back seat because of the danger posed by the air bag to those of small stature.)
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