SUV's, Longtime Targets of Auto Safety Analysts, Get High Marks From IIHS

Drivers of today’s sport utility vehicles are among the least likely to be killed in a crash, according to the most recent analysis of driver death rates conducted by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety . The full report appears in the organization’s latest status report, released Thursday.

Maybe even more surprising, the institute no longer cautions parents to avoid purchasing S.U.V.’s for their teenagers, which it did as recently as 2007 on account of the vehicles’ high centers of gravity, which could make them prone to rollovers.

“We have been seeing these patterns of improvements in S.U.V.’s,” said Anne McCartt, senior vice president for research at the institute, in a telephone interview. “But putting all this together and looking at it in different ways, it just really is striking.”

The driver death rate has dropped sharply for all types of passenger vehicles, but the most marked change has been among S.U.V.’s, the longtime punching bags of auto safety experts. According to the I.I.H.S., a nonprofit financed by the insurance industry, the widespread adoption of electronic stability control has positioned S.U.V.’s among the safest passenger vehicles on the road.

Electronic stability control, a crash avoidance technology, helps a driver maintain control of a vehicle by keeping it on its intended path and preventing skids. The federal government has issued a safety standard requiring electronic stability control on all new passenger vehicles starting with 2012 models.

The I.I.H.S. performs this analysis every few years to pinpoint differences in the on-road safety of different kinds of vehicles, and to track changes in the safety of the fleet over time. The last such analysis was in 2007.

The latest analysis ran from 2006 through 2009, which covered 2005-8 model years, and indicated an overall death rate of 48 deaths per million registered vehicles. This represented a 39 percent decline, from 79 deaths per million logged in the 2007 analysis, which ranged from 2002 through 2005 and included vehicles from the 2001-4 model years.

The decline, however, is most noticeable among drivers of S.U.V.’s, dropping 57 percent, from 65 deaths per million in the 2007 study to just 28 in the report released Thursday.

The report also included driver death rates for each of more than 150 individual vehicles, ranging from a zero death rate for seven models to 143 deaths for drivers of the Nissan 350Z sports car.

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