Q. What do the 3 cars below have in common with a power pole, or a tree or a concrete bridge railing post?
A. If you hit them in any of these doing 40mph your are almost certainly going to be dead.
People here are way underestimating how dangerous ALL cars are, and that includes SUV's, in any head on accident with any car. None offers walk away protection and most people in a head on die, regardless of car or car size and weight. The fact is most people die in single car accidents and going 40mph to zero in a Suburban or Smart or Trans Am is going to kill you. End of story.
What people think of as head-on accidents are actually usually off-set collisions from which vehicles veer off, spin, roll, collide further with roadside objects etc and it is the luck of the draw how you come off injury wise if you survive at all. A Smart hitting a Suburban in an offset swipe could have the Suburban veer into a tree and it's occupants all die while the Smart bounces into bushes and the occupants survive.
Regardless of any car's ability to survive any appreciable decelerating frontal impact, of which they all fair badly, the best defence is offence and that means primary safety being the ability to avoid the collision in the first place. Given that you will likely die in any vehicle in any head-on then the safer car and driver is the car and driver that is capable of avoiding the collision, either by superior vehicle dynamics or driver skill or both. Driving is a risk/reward equation that many take for granted or ill assess the risk and the rewards.
In real life a good driver in a small agile car about to collide head-on with a soccer mum in a Tahoe will likely survive by simply swerving out of the way of the Tahoe which due to the panicked response of the soccer mum is about to swerve into a roll-over killing her and her kids.
That's the sad truth about car safety...
BTW, even though the flimsy fibreglass bodied Corvette above would have way lower primary and secondary safety than the Smart, and I would likely be killed in any serious accident in it, it's what I would choose to drive.
