[scubbo]

> I’ve heard from so many foolish people who don’t understand physics that they feel safer driving a big heavy vehicle and being up high

Can you elaborate on this a little? I only took Physics up to University level so maybe I'm missing something, but - why _wouldn't_ that make you safer in the case of a collision? My naïve assumption is that it would:

a) decrease effective force on the passengers (greater mass of car => less acceleration from a given collision force => less force transferred to passenger)

b) make the car less likely to flip (assuming that the increased mass offsets the extra instability from the height of the vehicle - which, since the chassis is likely heavier on the bottom than the large hollow areas at the top, I think is likely)

c) move the passengers (slightly, but non-negligibly) out of the direct line of impact

"Driving a big heavy vehicle and being up high" might well make you _more likely_ to have a collision, meaning that you total aggregate chance of injury goes up even as "chance of injury, given a collision" goes down - but that's more about misunderstanding statistics than physics, as well as selfishly prioritizing personal safety over societal safety.

Thank you for helping me be less foolish!

[sneak]

It doesn’t make the car less likely to flip except when the mass is extremely concentrated at the bottom (such as in a Tesla where there is a huge dense battery pack in the bottom). The COG is much higher on SUVs and trucks than it is on passenger cars. It has improved, but it is still bad.

Being out of the “line of impact” is mostly irrelevant when you are going 80mph and the vehicle hits something. That kinetic energy is going somewhere.

Large/heavy vehicles are less maneuverable and take longer to stop because of their increased kinetic energy at cruise. In collisions the massive added weight means they have much more energy that needs to go somewhere at time of impact.

The passenger safety of a car in a collision is not determined by which vehicle is still more car-shaped after the wreck, otherwise the bigger and heavier your vehicle, the better off you’d be.

Additionally, pushing around the big and heavy chassis uses way more energy unnecessarily, which is not crash safety related, but is still very unsafe due to the fact that burning petrochemicals is currently in the process of literally destroying our civilization. You might not crash, but you will burn.