What's safer: SUV or car? (Q&A) | Auto Expert John Cadogan

Big issue for budding families: What’s safer - medium SUV or a conventional car?

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Today’s report is inspired by you … if you’re a dude named Wayne who can’t decide if a Cerato is safer than a Sportage, or vice-versa.

"Which sort of car would be safer to drive on the freeway from Ballina to the Gold Coast: Kia Cerato or Kia Sportage? I'm thinking Sportage might be having extra height and weight, was also wondering about the low ride height of Cerato in an accident situation, as everything seems to be going SUV size now. Would appreciate your opinion." - Wayne

This question concerns Sportage and Cerato specifically, obviously, but it’s broadly applicable to the ongoing safety debate about these two classes of vehicles: The so-called ‘medium’ SUVs - including RAV4, Tucson, CX-5 and Forester - versus the so-called ‘small’ cars - including i30, Corolla, Mazda3 and Impreza.

The best answer I can give you is that ‘safety’ is a very complex issue, and also quite hard to define, and distill down into simple terms.

On balance I’d say they’re equally safe, and dimensionally much closer than you might assume. And it really depends what kind of crash you decide to have have. (The lottery-winning result there: don’t crash, at all, then you can drive all day in a car made entirely of use-by date-expired Claymore mines… What could go wrong?)

Drilling down into this: in a crash into an unyielding object, like a big tree, it really depends on the design of the car. In this sort of crash, the car absorbs all of its own impact energy, so energy-absorbing crumply goodness is a real plus. And the extra mass of the Sportage really doesn’t help.

In a car-to-car crash, it probably does help to be heavier, but not always. See, I would rather be in the Cerato in the case of a Cerato T-boning a Sportage. (See what I mean about not being straightforward?)

In a rollover, the extra mass of a Sportage might be a distinct disadvantage (in terms of the dynamic loads crushing the roof) and also the slight extra height might increase rollover risk.

Rollover risk is obviously mitigated significantly by systems like stability control - because cars that don’t slide sideways don’t roll, generally.

In terms of the dimensional differences: they’re not as great as you might think. I compared the base spec of each vehicle in the following analysis. There’s only 186kg difference in the mass (1320kg for Cerato versus 1506 for the Sportage) - so they’re hardly chalk and cheese. A Cerato with four people in it could actually be heavier than a Sportage with just the driver…

There is 21.5 cm difference in the height, but of that, only 3.2 cm is the difference in ground clearance. So in terms of the mass centres and the height of the heavy components (such as the powertrain) they’re very similar.

(You’re generally not going to crash ‘roof-to-roof’; you’re going to crash ‘bumper to bumper’, down at engine level. And the difference in ride height for the people inside is going to be more like - maybe - 10 centimetres or something. Hardly profound.

So, to me it’s really a case of ‘buy the vehicle you want’ - because the differences in safety really are both minimal and hard to quantify. Also, dollar for dollar, you’ll get a much nicer Cerato than a Sportage for any given pricepoint.

For example, at about $35k drive-away (after negotiating) you’d likely score a top-spec Cerato GT with a potent 1.6 turbo engine, whereas dumping the same cash on a Sportage gets you only a mid-spec SX with an adequate 2.0 atmo engine, and less standard equipment generally.

Safety’s just too complex to call it, when the vehicles are this close - at least it is if your … crystal balls are down for maintenance.