Insurance Institute: small cars not always safe

Remember when gas prices reached $4 a gallon in some cities? Back then, everyone promised that they’d ditch their SUVs and swap them with small, fuel-efficient cars.

Now that gas is back at around $2 a gallon, I’m not sure how many SUV owners are still thinking about trading in their fuel hogs. But if they want to keep those big cars, they can now at least point to a new study by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety that says that larger cars are often far more safer than are their smaller cousins.

A story in the New York Times, complete with photos of crumpled crash-test dummies, said that three mini-model cars all performed poorly in collision testing. The Honda Fit, Toyota Yaris and Smart Fortwo — where do they come up with these names? — did little to protect their crash-test dummy drivers in staged collisions with mid-size models.

The Insurance Institute said that consumers who rely on mini-models for fuel efficiency are making a trade-off when it comes to safety.

Personally, I don’t understand why anyone would drive anything other than a Toyota Corolla. My Corolla, which I’ve driven for more than 10 years, boasts good fuel efficiency and high crash-test ratings. And, it doesn’t have such a goofy name.