A recent study from the US has found that SUVs are causing more cyclist injuries, with crashes with SUVs resulting in 55 per cent more trauma and 63 per cent more head injuries than crashes with cars, owing to taller front-end designs.

Research from Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, an independent and non-profit American organisation has revealed that SUVs pose a far greater danger to cyclists on road than other cars, and their front ends are largely to blame.

The study looked at not only the rate and severity of injuries to cyclists caused by cars and SUVs, but also the way that the damage was inflicted upon the victims.

Samuel Monfort and Becky Mueller, IIHS statisticians and lead authors of the study, looked at 71 bicycle crashes in Michigan, compiled by the International Center for Automotive Medicine’s Pedestrian Consortium. All involved cyclists over the age of 15, and a single car or SUV. And according to his analysis, there was a clear and obvious pattern with the crashes.

The tall front end of SUVs can strike bicyclists higher on their bodies above the centre of gravity. This results in cyclists getting knocked down, where they can be run over, rather than being thrown onto the hood of the vehicle, he said.

> SUVs ‘eight times more dangerous’ to kids walking or cycling than smaller cars are

For the study, Monfort used the Abbreviated Injury Scale — which assesses injuries by body region — and the Injury Severity Score, which combines injuries from different regions into an overall assessment.

It revealed that ground-impact injuries were twice as common on SUV crashes. Further, trauma to the body was 55 per cent higher for SUVs than for cars, as well as scores for head injuries inflicted by SUVs were 63 per cent higher.

Some 10 per cent of the SUV incidents examined also resulted in the bicyclist being run over, while none of the car crashes had a similar effect. Even if cyclists weren’t run over by SUVs, the rate of ground-contact injuries following impacts with SUVs were more than twice as common compared with cars.

The data also suggested that SUVs tend to cause the most injuries with their wheels or undercarriage, after knocking cyclists to the ground. In the eight accidents with information about what part of the vehicle actually hurt the cyclist, the wheels or undercarriage of SUVs were responsible for 82 per cent of head injuries.

According to a US Government agency, fatal bicycle accidents have increased by 33 per cent since 2010. In 2021, 966 cyclists were reported killed in crashes. This is up from 621 bicyclist fatalities in 2010, IIHS said.

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Last year, we reported that another US study showed that SUVs are eight times more dangerous to kids walking or cycling than smaller cars are. It also found that although SUVs are involved in much fewer crashes than standard cars, they are twice as fatal.

Previous research from IIHS has also shown that SUVs are markedly fatal to pedestrians as well, with fatal collisions holding a probability of 30 per cent, as opposed to 23 per cent for cars, when travelling at speeds of 20-39mph. However, at speeds greater than 40mph, all three crashes with SUVs killed the pedestrian, compared with 7 out of 13 crashes involving cars.

The IIHS argued that the growing popularity of SUVS is to blame for the rising number of injuries and fatalities, and said that there needs to be additional research into more protective front ends.

“We found that SUVs injured bicyclists they struck more severely than cars did, even after controlling for pre-impact speed, time of day, location of the crash, and bicyclist age and sex,” the report concludes. “The pattern of results suggests that the size and shape of SUV front ends are responsible for the differences in bicyclist injury outcomes, which is consistent with our past findings on pedestrian crash outcomes.”