SUV Rollover Crash Facts

In US more than 8,000 people loose their lives in single-vehicle rollover accidents each year - advocates for highway and auto safety.

Rollovers are considered to be the most unsafe type of vehicle crashes because of their high rate of occupant evictions and head injuries. Many aspects add to the incident of rollover crashes or accidents. Rollover are strongly associated with the dangerous and reckless driving behaviors, poor road design and vehicle type. Few categories of vehicles, for instance sport utility vehicles – SUV and small pickup trucks, are more horizontal to rollover than any other classes of vehicles.

At the moment the central government has launched no performance standard to require improved vehicle stability to reduce the incidence of vehicle rollovers. Additionally, existing vehicle crash protection requirements do not sufficiently protect against the types of serious injuries most often connected with rollover crashes.

ROLLOVER CRASH FACTS

• In 1998, 10,280 fatal crashes involved rollovers. (NHTSA)

• Rollover crashes are accounted for roughly half of the single-vehicle, as opposed to multiple-vehicle, crash deaths. (NHTSA)

• Vehicle rollover crashes are particularly serious as they usually result in head injuries. Head suffering is the most common type of deadly and nonfatal injury in rollover crashes. (NHTSA)

• The rate of serious wounds in rollover crashes is 36% higher than in crashes where there is no rollover. (NHTSA)

• The high fatality and injury rates are due, in part, to the high percentage of rollover crashes in which passengers are ejected from the vehicle. Evictions account for 63% of all deadly accident in rollover crashes and frequently resulted in expensive and devastating head injuries. (NHTSA)

• Over 90% of rollover collides of passenger cars are single-vehicle crashes. (NHTSA)

• Sport utility vehicles are more flat to rollover than other vehicle types. This is due to their higher ground consent and narrow breadth which tend to make the vehicle top-heavy and more likely to roll over in a crash. (NHTSA)

• Sport utility vehicles, as a class, account for almost 70 percent of all rollover crash fatalities. (NHTSA)