Marketing efforts hide real safety levels of smaller vehicles
Marketing's primary function is to put a product in its best light, and everyone in our media-savvy society knows it.
Pre-schoolers to pensioners, we take a commercial in and add salt as required.
But there's a difference between, say, yet another pointless attempt to make the Toyota Camry look cool and marketing that misrepresents or over-states the safety levels of certain vehicles.
Yet that's exactly what's going on now, as various car companies go to great lengths to make you think their vehicles are safer than they actually are.
These marketing efforts involve an effort to disguise the fact that mass is a critical factor in a crash, that the larger and heavier a vehicle the safer it's likely to be.
People intuitively understand the primacy of mass in a conflict, as it's a universal response to tell a large person fighting a small person to ''pick on someone your own size.''
If some outlaw sanctioning authority arranged a boxing match between, say, a flyweight and a heavyweight, society would inherently support any effort by the police to stop the fight.
Government safety agencies all make a point of mentioning the importance of mass in a crash.
Yet there are marketing efforts going on right now that are trying to make buyers believe that these rules do not apply to today's vehicles.
Most of the misdirection involves the promotion of those multi-star front-impact crash tests, with companies advertising that their vehicle got the U.S. government's highest-rated crash rating of five-out-of-five stars.
Volvo, for example, has just issued a press release about the crash rating for its new S40 compact. ''Five stars for the driver; five stars for the passenger. The highest rating the U.S. Government organization grants to passenger vehicles.'' You are clearly supposed to think that you couldn't be in a safer vehicle.
While Volvo's claim (among others) is not wrong, it's not right either. In testing a vehicle's behaviour in narrowly-focussed and highly-controlled impact situations, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) does indeed grade vehicles out of five stars.
But the results only count within those vehicles in the same general weight category. Right above its ratings on its website, NHTSA has this warning in bold letters: ''Frontal tests should be compared only within the same weight class, or within 250 pounds (113 kg) of the vehicle weight.''
So, a 2003 Mini Cooper (whose curbweight starts at 1145 kg) with four stars for its frontal crash results is not as safe (according to NHTSA) as a five-star Chevrolet Impala (1440 kg) if the two collided.