The NYT article that Nathan H. (#5) linked to is consistent with my hunch:
“Complicating matters, a statistical graph included in the institute’s study indicated that per million cars registered that were one to three years old in 2007, the death rate was higher for drivers in small cars than in minis, which are even smaller. One reason might be that the smallest cars are not driven as many miles on high-speed roadways, Mr. Lund said.”

In any case, we won’t reach a conclusion in the absence of detailed statistics (which may not even be available yet because the Smart hasn’t been around that long). I just wanted to point out that bigger is not necessarily safer.

(And that’s just the windshield perspective; from the point of view of pedestrians, smaller is safer, but I digress…)

Unless you can produce evidence that the collision rate would be lower if more people drove small cars, there’s no reason to believe it would be. So we’re left with the risk of injury in the event of a collision. And no one seems to dispute that that risk is higher for occupants of small cars than occupants of large ones.

The point that vroomfondel is trying to make, which is a legitmate one, is that there may be any number of reasons why insurance claims are greater for smaller cars, none of which have to do with the intrinsic merits or demerits of smaller cars. One that comes to mind is that people with low incomes are more likely to own small cars and also more likely to get into car accidents. Also, people who live out in the country are more likely to own large cars and also (I would guess) less likely to get into accidents. All this is a longwinded way of saying, “correlation does not imply causation”.

The point is that small cars DON’T seem to help you avoid collisions. Their collision rate seems to be, if anything, even higher than the collision rate of larger cars. So if smaller cars provide no advantage in terms of collision avoidance, and expose their occupants to greater risk of injury when a collision does occur, that’s a reason for consumers to buy larger cars instead.

“The frequency of claims filed for crash damage is higher for mini 4-door cars than for midsize ones.”

Is it broken down by which vehicle caused the crash?

Regarding the figures you quote, I can think of any number of reasons why there are more insurance claims for small cars. Maybe people use them for short errands and the insurance claims are mostly about fender benders at the mall. Or maybe drivers of small cars are more accident prone because they tend to be younger and less experienced. It would be interesting to see statistics that focus on fatalities, adjusted for age and income of the driver.

In any case, I’m rather dismayed to find myself agreeing with Mercedes-Benz: Those tests were extreme and tell us little about safety in the real world.

I just took a look at the IIHS study, and it states that insurance claims data contradicts your claim that small cars are less likely to be involved in collisions than larger ones:

Yet another claim is that minicars are easier to maneuver, so their drivers can avoid crashes in the first place. Insurance claims experience says otherwise. The frequency of claims filed for crash damage is higher for mini 4-door cars than for midsize ones.

So your argument, if I’m understanding it correctly, is that small cars are less likely to be involved in collisions than large cars, and that this lower risk of collision offsets the higher in risk of injury if a collision actually does occur. Can you cite any studies supporting this claim?

Test crashing Benzes into Smarts doesn’t tell us anything we don’t already know from physics class. But Smarts are marketed and sold in urban environments—how about crashing a Benz into an “urban pedestrian” dummy, seeing how that goes? Would that be terribly enlightening for the Institute, make a good story (with video!) for the press? It’s sickening. The IIHS is running interference to protect the casino of death and destruction that they profit from, quite naturally. I’m not surprised the WSJ has swallowed the story but would have hoped for an ounce of critical thinking from the NYT. No such luck:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/14/automobiles/14crash.html

If you hit another object at high speed, basic physics tells you that you’re better off if you’re heavier than the other one. That’s passive safety, and it explains why insecure drivers favor big cars. They are simply resigned to the fact that sooner or later they’ll hit something, and when that happens, they want to come out on top. (I’m not making this up; the automobile industry has internal studies to that effect.)

If you’re a competent driver in a responsive car, on the other hand, you’ll be able to avoid most collisions. That’s active safety. It’s where small cars shine, and it’s the main reason why studies like the one in the article are misleading at best.

Wow, Detroit and Buffalo are twins again. Buffalo also built a beautiful (in this case, Art Deco), huge train station way outside downtown in hopes of further “growth”, and it’s also been vacant for decades and in danger of demolition. I don’t know about Detroit, but sadly the station in Buffalo is really of little use for anything located where it is. It’s not even on a bus route.

As we unwind from the bubble, you have sellers who are either greedy and entitled and won’t sell at market, or who borrowed too much and can’t sell. And you have buyers who either won’t overpay or (because no one will lend them the money anymore) can’t overpay. Even when there is a foreclosure, banks simply “buy” the properties at the value of the mortgage and do not repay, so you get no sales at the old high prices.

New York is where places such as California or Arizona were a year or two ago. They’ve passed through the period of standoff and are in the period of distress sales. We are just starting the standoff period. All you have to do is look at California to see where we are going.