A new study from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety shows that while design changes in new SUVs make them less lethal to smaller vehicles on the road, they remain more dangerous to bicyclists than cars.
The reason remains the same: the higher front grille on the larger sport-utility vehicles is more dangerous because it strikes a cyclist’s body. The group, also known as IIHS, conducted a study before about the issue and called for changes to SUV design to make the vehicles safer.
Newer SUVs are safer in collisions with smaller cars, trucks and crossovers; however, the laws of physics are unyielding when it comes to bicyclists being hit by big utes.
“SUVs tend to knock riders down, where they can also be run over, rather than vaulting them onto the hood of the vehicle,” said IIHS Statistician Sam Monfort, the lead author of the study. “That’s probably because the higher front end of an SUV strikes the cyclist above their center of gravity.”
Full impact
When a person riding a bike is struck by a car, often the rider slides up on to the hood of the car, saving them from further potential injuries. When a cyclists is hit by a full-size SUV, they bear the brunt of the entire grille.
Often they’re hit with such force the smash to the ground and, if they aren’t run over, they’re heads hit the roadway, causing significant injuries. In fact, ground-impact injuries are twice as common when SUVs are involved, the most recent study showed.
IIHS noted the new findings were similar to those in the previous study. That study also traced the increased risk to the height of SUVs’ front ends.
Fatal bicycle crash rates have risen dramatically during the past 10 years. In 2020, 932 bicyclists were killed on U.S. roads, up from a low of 621 in 2010. Experts believe the reason may be the increasing dominance of pickups and SUVs in the U.S. vehicle fleet. Research consistently shows that such larger vehicles are more dangerous to bicyclists than cars.
What they found
Researchers looked at detailed crash data from 71 Michigan bicycle crashes compiled by the International Center for Automotive Medicine’s Pedestrian Consortium. Each crash involved a bicyclist age 16 or older and a single SUV or car.
The data included police reports, medical records, crash reconstructions and other information. The information was used to analyze how injuries and other aspects of crashes varied for cars and SUVs. Pickups were excluded from the analysis there was not enough data to arrive at firm conclusions.
While certain types of injuries were nearly universal when comparing car and SUV collisions with cyclists, in every measurement used by the medical field, riders hit by SUVs fared much worse than those hit by cars.
The Abbreviated Injury Scale is used to assess injuries by body region. On it, the average scores for head injuries inflicted by SUVs were 63% higher than for those caused by cars. There were no statistically significant severity differences between vehicle types for injuries to other regions.
The Injury Severity Score combines the injuries from the different body regions into an overall assessment. Using that method, trauma to the body as a whole was 55% higher for SUVs than for cars.
The records for 23 car crashes and 21 SUV crashes included details about how the bicyclist moved after being struck. In those crashes, only cars caused injuries by vaulting bicyclists onto the vehicle’s roof and only SUVs caused injuries by running bicyclists over.