MINI Rated Safest in Class

“[D]eath rate of automobiles”? I expect my MINI to live forever!

ejkd — I agree totally. I ordered my 2007 Mini Cooper S (coming in 3 weeeeeks!!!) … and the estimate on car insurance (State Farm) was much, much less than i expected.

Also, this is very good to know, considering a lot of people are giving me flack about Mini not being ‘safe’

Although I usually fully support safety tests, I find this one to be irrelevant for a couple of reasons. First off, the Chevy Astro van has been shown time and time again to be one of the most unsafe vehicles on the road, with many tests showing extreme injuries from only minor accidents. The other, more obvious reason is this:

Very large four-door cars
Ford Crown Victoria 2003-04 45 Mercury Grand Marquis 2003-04 75

These are the same cars, with the same safety equipment, and built in the same factory. For the Mercury to have 30 more deaths per million shows just how badly skewed these figures might be.

Drew

The 350Z and the G35 being on completely opposite sides of the study is also pretty revealing about how useless this data is. It’s the same car, with the 350Z having only a 5 inch shorter length.

Had they weighted the data for the demographics that drive the cars, it might be slightly more useful.

Also, if I’m reading the index correctly, that’s vehicle deaths per million cars. There aren’t even a million MINIs registered in the US, which means there haven’t even been 68 deaths attributed to MINIs. Certainly it’s hard to compare a vehicle like the crown victoria or honda civic to the MINI because of how many of their vehicles have been produced. But having to extrapolate the data so that the statistic shows more deaths than have even actually occured seems very skewed to me.

Couple that with the lack of correction for variables and this data is basically useless.

The most disturbing thing about this article is the line about heavier vehicles being safe. If a demographic filter was put on this data, I guarantee that we’d find that the safest demographics also drive the heavier cars statistically because the majority of safety minded drivers don’t know that body stiffness is the real measure of safety. So they instead purchase big, heavy cars and trucks and skew the data toward heavier vehicles.

These are the same cars, with the same safety equipment, and built in the same factory. For the Mercury to have 30 more deaths per million shows just how badly skewed these figures might be.

I don’t think that’s indicative of the numbers being scewed or inaccurate, but rather a good case for the argument that it’s not the cars themselves but rather the average drivers of these particular makes and models that are noteworthy. It should read more like “The driver of a 350Z is more likely to get himself killed than the driver of a G35.” Of course that’s what DB said already:

We’ll leave it up to you to figure out what this says both about the cars and their typical drivers.

It’s interesting more from a sociological standpoint than from an engineering or car safety point of view. It’s recreational data at best, I think, but that doesn’t make it inaccurate.

Also, if I’m reading the index correctly, that’s vehicle deaths per million cars. There aren’t even a million MINIs registered in the US, which means there haven’t even been 68 deaths attributed to MINIs. Certainly it’s hard to compare a vehicle like the crown victoria or honda civic to the MINI because of how many of their vehicles have been produced. But having to extrapolate the data so that the statistic shows more deaths than have even actually occured seems very skewed to me.

Interesting, but it doesn’t make the number irrelevant or inaccurate. That’s just how they chose to break down the fraction. It’s easier to wrap your head around 65 of every 1,000,000 cars than to compare 0.0065% to 0.0202%. So whether or not there are actually a million cars doesn’t really matter. It’s the proportion that’s interesting. Not particularly useful, but interesting.

Either way, the MINI is at the top of its category so what are we complaining about?