That is why SUV drivers and passengers are twice as likely to be killed in a rollover than those in a standard vehicle. Weight is added to a steel plate approximately 3 feet wide and six feet long that is placed at an angle over the roof line. A roof passes even if it collapses five inches. With increased safety awareness in the 1960s of crashworthiness, seat belt restraint systems, headrests, and gas tank safety, safety engineers focused on protecting the passenger compartment to increase survivability by balancing the interplay of controlled crush and occupant restraint. Even though is well known that roofs are extraordinarily soft, that even belted passengers are at great risk for serious injury in a rollover, and the greater the roof crush the more severe the injury, the government has never mandated a dynamic roof crush test.
Materials perform differently when subjected to dynamic forces found in a real world collision.
But the government's static test standard ignores this longstanding and well-known engineering fact. Instead, OEMs defend roof failure claims by arguing that high speeds and impacts are responsible for deaths and injuries, not the amount of roof crush. OEMs claim that death, brain damage and spinal cord injuries are caused before the roof collapsed into the passenger's headroom and that the victim was thrown into the roof by centrifugal force before the vehicle landed on its roof. Only a handful admit, such as Volvo and Saab, that passengers should be protected by a safety cage that preserves a safe passenger zone. With the avalanche of SUV rollover cases and the widespread knowledge that SUVs are inherently unsafe when drivers engage in life-saving maneuvers, Ford will be offering rollover sensors and rollover air bags on its 2001 SUV models.