Imma Perfetto
Cosmos science journalist
Consumers are switching from small and medium-sized passenger cars in favour of taller, heavier SUVs and light trucks, but a new study has brought the threat to vulnerable pedestrians and cyclists back into the headlights.
A review of scientific research has found that pedestrians and cyclists are 44% more likely to be killed in a collision with an SUV or light truck, compared to a passenger car. The outlook is even more dire for children, who are 82% more likely to be killed when struck by the larger vehicles.
The systematic review and meta-analysis pooled and assessed 24 studies, including real-world crash data from 682,509 pedestrian and cyclist collisions which occurred between the late 1980s to 2022.
Professor Stuart Newstead, Director of the Monash University Accident Research Centre (MUARC), who was not involved in the research, told Cosmos the results are consistent with findings in Australia.
“For fashion and for perceived lifestyle benefits, or whatever else people have gone to these vehicles for, it’s actually creating a safety disbenefit for us as a community, which I think is quite concerning, but particularly pedestrians and cyclists suffer the most,” says Newstead.
“If you imagine a large car or a medium car … it’ll collide with your legs and throw you up onto the bonnet, and the bonnet is nice and long and soft. That is actually the best way to get hit by a car if you’re pedestrian.”
This isn’t the case if you get hit by a sport utility vehicle (SUV ) or utility vehicle (called utes in Australia), which tend to have higher and blunter front ends.
“The geometry on those cars is very unfavourable,” Newstead says.
“It hits you in the upper in the torso, upper thorax, and where all your vital organs are, and you tend to get thrown to the ground and potentially even run over.”
According to Newstead, these vehicles now make up 70% of the car market in Australia.
“SUVs now make up over 50% of all new car sales … and commercial vehicles, particularly commercial Utes, we have a great love of dual cab Utes, they’re often around 20% of new vehicle sales,” he says.
“We have basically abandoned our traditional large and medium cars that we used to drive 20 years ago.”
These big, heavy vehicles also pose slightly more risk to other road users compared to a regular passenger car, according to Newstead.
He adds that utes in particular don’t provide any additional protection to passengers than a regular car.
“Across all crash types, even compensating for the fact that you’re 400-500kg heavier than most of the vehicles on the road … it’s not giving you a benefit overall.
“Something as large as a 4-wheel drive, when you crash into a tree, is an enormous amount of mass to manage.
“They also tip over more easily as well. When you roll a car that is particularly dangerous.
“They’re not giving that benefit, yet they’re posing much higher injury risk to everyone else on the road.
“When you look at how the fleet’s progressing … you’d get a sort of 3% or 4% reduction in the road toll just because of the fleet regenerating, and that has stalled in the last decade which is really problematic.”
In 2024, Australia’s road toll reached 1301 deaths, increasing 3.3% on the year prior. This was the 4th consecutive year of increasing road fatalities, for the first time since the 1960s.
The government has now set an ambitious target of zero deaths and serious injuries on Australian roads by 2050.
The global systematic review estimates that if all SUVs in the US were replaced with passenger cars, it would avert 17% of adult pedestrian and cyclist fatalities from car crashes (about 630 deaths per year) and about 27% (or 60 deaths per year) for children.
“We [also] looked at, if you went to a single class of vehicle to optimise the safety of the fleet, what would that be? And of course, it’d be a small or medium car,” adds Newstead.
So, how can the impacts of SUVs and light trucks on Australia’s road safety be mitigated?
One option would be to incorporating pedestrian safety into Australia’s vehicle safety standards, as has been done in places such as Europe and Japan.
“We never adopted those standards in Australia for whatever reason, and the Europeans have had them for close to 20 years,” says Newstead, who adds that not incentivising people to buy these vehicles would also be a logical step.
“Particularly for the ute problem, we’re actually almost providing incentives for people to buy them through taxation, through things like instant asset write off, through taxation deductions and no fringe benefits tax on commercial vehicles.”
Several cities and countries around the world have also introduced or are currently considering policies to discourage use of large vehicles through higher parking charges.
“Whatever you do takes a long time,” says Newstead.
“We’ve been buying utes for the last 15 years, and even if you stop right now, it’s still going to make another 20 years to get them out of the fleet.”
As of March 2025, new vehicle safety regulations came into effect under the Australian Design Rule (ADR) which requires all new vehicles to be fitted with car-to-car Autonomous Emergency Braking (AEB) systems which automatically hit the brakes if a collision is imminent.
“But they don’t prevent all the crashes that you see because they don’t often work well at night, sometimes they don’t work quick enough if someone emerges from between a parked vehicle or something,” says Newstead.
This is where lower vehicle speeds and separation between pedestrians, cyclists, and vehicles comes in.
“Once you start hitting people at above 40-50km/h it doesn’t matter what you hit them with, it’s going to be quite catastrophic,” says Newstead.
“The design of the vehicle becomes particularly pertinent when you’re also matching the impact speeds with things that are relatively more survivable by pedestrians.”
A recent study found that speed zones of 51–80 km/h in Australia are particularly lethal for vulnerable road users such as pedestrians, cyclists and motorcyclists.
“There’s been more focus on 30km/h and 40km/h speed zones in many cities, but we’re so far behind European cities,” says Newstead.
“In that context, most [well-developed] European cities have blanket … 30km/h speed limits, 50km/h in the outer urban areas, and you only hit those high speeds when you’re on high quality motorways.
“We’ve [come] a long way to putting 40km/h zones in, but there’s probably a lot more we can do. School zones are another area we’ve done quite well on, but we’re just so far behind in that conversation in Australia, for whatever reason, and it’s a conversation we need to have!”
