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This article was featured in the March 2009 issue of Consumer Reports Magazine.
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Raise the roof-crush standard
Photograph by John Fulton
One morning seven years ago, Patrick Parker was driving to work on a rural Texas road when a deer jumped in front of his truck. He steered to avoid it but hit a second deer that appeared from the median. Parker's truck flipped up and rolled over. He was wearing his safety belt, but the rollover flattened the roof, crushing his spinal cord and partially paralyzing him. Parker and his wife, Dena, pushed for tougher roof-strength standards but nothing changed. Some 24,000 people are severely injured each year in rollovers in the U.S., and more than 10,000 others are killed. Crushed roofs most likely contribute to serious or fatal injuries in more than a quarter of rollover crashes.
The current standard for vehicle roof strength was set in 1973 by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. It requires a roof to be strong enough to withstand 1.5 times the vehicle's weight. Roofs are tested by pressing a metal plate on the roof over the driver's seat.
A 2005 law ordered NHTSA to rewrite the standard by July 2008. NHTSA postponed the decision until October, then December, then April 2009, effectively handing it off to the new administration.
Ordinarily, a delay in updating standards is not good. But in this case, Consumers Union and other safety groups view it as an opportunity to go much further than NHTSA's proposed changes, which we think are too weak.
The agency's idea was to increase roof-testing pressure to 2.5 times the vehicle's weight. That will barely reduce fatalities. Instead, NHTSA should increase testing pressure even more and develop a dynamic test that better reflects real-world rollovers. The test should also factor in how occupants are restrained in a rollover and include a standard to ensure that roof pillars do not reduce visibility. NHTSA has shown with frontal-crash and rollover-resistance testing that it can reduce variability to an acceptable level.
The new administration should move fast to upgrade the 36-year-old standards, which were written long before millions of rollover-prone SUVs hit the road. It's inexcusable not to use current testing technology to ensure that auto roofs are strong enough to prevent injuries and save lives.
What you can do
- Choose a car with electronic stability control and side-curtain air bags.
- Be aware that SUVs are the most rollover-prone vehicles, followed by pickup trucks.
