What are “mismatch” crashes?
There are a couple of issues when you have large SUVs getting into crashes with smaller passenger cars. One is the obvious size mismatch. The average SUV is heavier than the average passenger car and physics being what it is, that’s a bad thing for the passenger car in a multi-car collision. The second mismatch is the bumper height. Most SUVs are four-wheel drive, which were designed originally for off-road use. They sit up higher than passenger cars, and many times when they get into crashes with passenger cars the bumpers do not meet. So you have a collision in which the SUV suffers little or no damage to its bumper, but that bumper’s done a lot of damage to the metal panels of the vehicle that it hit. Is this mismatch reflected in the injuries involved? So far we’ve only done a limited investigation, into property damage losses. We don’t at this point have hard data on the injury side, although one would unfortunately have to come to the conclusion that the likelihood of injuries is
