SUV Safety Guide: Avoiding Rollovers and Rear-End Collisions

Some call them climate changers, but for the time being they are still better known to most of us as Sports Utility Vehicles, or SUVs. Love them or hate them, these gas-guzzling vehicles seem destined to be all around us in traffic for at least another decade or so; at least until rising gas prices makes them unaffordable for all but doctors, lawyers, politicians and entertainers. For now, however, most SUV drivers are still relatively normal, average people. Relatively.

And since most relatively normal, average people don't fully realize that a SUV is a truck and not some car/truck hybrid, there are still an amazingly large number of drivers of these climate changing gas-guzzling vehicles who don't fully comprehend that driving one requires some special knowledge in order to be as safe as that guy down there below them driving the Prius; that gas-saving hybrid that so many SUV drivers look down upon figuratively as well.

By now we can only hope that every SUV driver has seen a Dateline or 20/20 report on the rollover dangers of their vehicle of peer-pressure, advertising-controlled choice, and even if those dangers were overblown and subsequently corrected in newer models, the fact remains that SUVs are still more prone to rollover accidents than cars or pickup trucks or minivans. SUV safety begins with this still-present rollover danger. Because sports utility vehicles are built with a center of gravity higher than other vehicles, this danger will never fully go away. And so it behooves any driver interested in SUV safety to learn how to handle their vehicle when going around turns, or driving during inclement weather.