Rollover crashes were particularly troublesome as the death rate for passengers in rollover crashes was 9.75 per 100,000 vehicles.
Protection against unreasonable risk of rollovers of passenger cars, multipurpose passenger vehicles, and trucks with a gross vehicle weight rating of 8,500 pounds or less and an unloaded vehicle weight of 5,500 pounds or less.
In the adjusted model, driver alcohol and drug use, rollover, passenger gender, and vehicle year were not predictive of mortality.
About 47percentt of fatalities among sport utility vehicle or pickup truck passengers are related to rollovers, compared to 22percentt for passengers in cars, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
To improve the performance properties of heavy vehicles, i.e. to reduce the risk of rollovers, improve passenger comfort and road holding, a reconfigurable fault-tolerant control design of the active suspensions and the active brake is performed.
Rollovers are a particularly deadly type of accident that continues to rise as more Americans buy light trucks, particularly sport utility vehicles and pickup trucks, which are more prone to rollovers than passenger cars because they ride higher off the ground.
A common argument against further fuel economy improvements, besides their potential expense, is that they make vehicles unsafe by making them lighter, and studies have indeed shown that -- while S.U.V.'s are not necessarily safer than passenger cars because of rollovers -- larger vehicles tend to be safer than smaller vehicles of the same type.
Volvo says this type of study has taught it how to prevent vehicle occupants from hitting or being hit by the inside of the cockpit (by shaping and reinforcing frame members and designing its whiplash-protection system called WHIPS that works with both seat shape and seat-belt pretensioners to hold the passenger in place even in a rollover).
Congress still has not acted, despite all of the statistics that show that most fatalities result from passengers' being ejected from the bus in rollovers.
A bipartisan measure to require seat belts, roofs that can withstand a rollover, better windows to prevent passenger ejection in crashes, and other vital safety steps was introduced in the Senate by Sherrod Brown, Democrat of Ohio, and Kay Bailey Hutchison, Republican of Texas.
