What vehicles are actually safer?

[Paul]

Paul, I think you're confusing crumpling with survivability... these do not necessarily go hand-in-hand. To bring this to the extreme, build a car out of aluminum foil. Now run this car into a Suburban, with both vehicles traveling 50mph... yes, the aluminum foil car will have crumpled, but not enough energy will have been absorbed... the person in the foil car will still be dead. I view subcompact cars as not much more protection than this hypothetical situation, and the numbers of deaths for those cars... Neons, Prisms, Metros, etc. substantiate my view.

-Norm.

You seem to have missed what I was comparing. Not Camry to Suburban, Suburban to Suburban and Camry to Camry. If its got to be an accident with a Suburban I'm taking the train that day 

The Highway Safety report was interesting too. My '04 Tacoma shows as being about as safe as a Suburban. The data is newer than my information. Check out some of the better brand name small and mid-size passenger cars. Many are doing well, even bettering many SUVs in terms of drivers deaths. The sample size of most vehicles was well under 1 million, to small to speak with confidence about the actual death rate per million per year. (2 examples - the Toyota Echo has a small sample size and looks to be safer than either the Civic or Corolla, the 2-door and 4-door VW Golf have very different death rates and very small sample sizes)

Thanks for the link.