We’ve known for a while that women are at greater risk of injury in car crashes than men. A new Insurance Institute for Highway Safety study sheds more light on why that may be the case, and one factor is vehicle size. Women tend to drive smaller cars, and men tend to drive larger ones.
The IIHS analyzed data from police-reported accidents in 1998-2015, and found some revealing statistics. Women were three times as likely to suffer moderate injury, described as a concussion or broken bone, in a frontal collision than men. They were also twice as likely as men to sustain serious injuries, for example a collapsed lung or traumatic brain injury.
The IIHS determined that one explanation for these findings was the fact that, in these accident reports, 70 percent of the women were in passenger cars. while only 60 percent of men were. On the flip side, 20 percent of men were in pickups, compared to only 5 percent of women. Minivans and SUVs had a 50/50 split between men and women. Unfortunately, we couldn’t find any distinction made between unibody and ladder-frame SUVs.
Read the article at Autoblog.
