It may go without saying, but when a motor vehicle collides with a pedestrian, in the majority of cases, the pedestrian is going to be the loser in this battle. When the vehicle involved in the collision is an SUV, the stakes are even higher and the risk and severity of the injuries suffered by the unprotected victim are typically much worse. As a Rhode Island personal injury attorney, David Tapalian has seen serious and often life-threatening injuries occur when a person on foot is hit by a moving vehicle. Frequently, the extent of the injuries the person suffers, and their risk of death, corelates to the size of the SUV or truck. A study last year by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) backed up this assumption when it looked at which vehicles were more dangerous in pedestrian car accidents and reported that sports utility vehicles were found to kill and injure pedestrians more frequently than other types of cars.
IIHS Study Findings
Considering that SUVs make up almost 50% of motor vehicle sales in the U.S. each year and are projected to continually rise, and sedans make up less than a quarter of sales, the study findings are daunting. The primary difference between getting hit by a smaller vehicle versus a sports utility vehicle occurs when a collision takes place at an intermediate speed. For example: