Vehicle Safety News

The New York Times, "Safety Decoder: How to Make Sense of the Crash Ratings"

The Ford Escape is "a genius on anything from dirt to gravel to granite," at least according to a recent ad in Maxim magazine. Not only does it have "brains for rocks," whatever that means, it has a computer that checks for "wheel slippage 200 times a second."Not that any of that helped on the government's rollover test. The Escape, a sport-utility vehicle, tipped up on two wheels during the test, a potentially deadly result. The ad does not mention that, of course.

Likewise, an ad for the Dodge Durango in GQ boasts that it gets a "five-star" rating on the government's frontal crash test, but does not mention that the rear-wheel-drive version of the S.U.V. gets only three out of five stars on the government's rollover test and has been assessed a 21 percent risk of rolling over in a single-vehicle accident.Ads for the 2005 Suzuki Verona do not mention safety at all, pitching it as a $17,994 way to "reward your expectations." As it happens, the sedan is one of a small number of vehicles that merit only three stars on the government's frontal crash test, a result that represents a significantly higher risk of serious injury in such accidents than competing vehicles.