Minicar Owner vs. the IIHS

As the so-far happy owner of a 2009 Honda Fit, I read the results of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety's minicar crash tests with some dismay — as in, oh joy, there goes my already not-super-cheap car insurance premium. That's despite the headline being purely Dog Bites Man, as in we all know small cars will end up on the short end of head-on crashes with much larger cars. If anything, the whole exercise begs the question of why IIHS didn't just face the Fit, Yaris, and ForTwo off against the Honda Pilot, Toyota Sequoia, and Mercedes GL-class, respectively. Surely minicar drivers are impressively fucked in front-offset collisions with 2-1/2-ton SUVs.IIHS's prescription is that minicar intenders opt instead for high-MPG midsize cars. That's not totally objectionable (*), though in listing as alternatives the Camry and Ford Fusion hybrids plus the VW Jetta diesel IIHS effectively exhausts the current U.S. market in such vehicles. At least it makes them look more reasonable than if they had followed their logic to its conclusion that if we really wanted to be safe, we should all drive the largest possible vehicles. In fact, it's just as easy to interpret the IIHS results as favoring a shift to more light, small, slow cars with advanced safety features like my dear little Fit.This is a story of externalities (of course), and in a world that's stupidly been populated with oversized cars and light trucks, the minicar driver sacrifices his or her lower extremeties in a severe crash so that drivers of legacy vehicles can be more lightly injured. Stick us in a high-MPG tanks instead, and there's a good chance that the aggregate damage from crashes will be increased — which on its face is socially undesirable if not obviously so from the insurance industry's perspective. Were small vehicles much more prevalent than they are now in the U.S., then the public could rely on the good performance of the better-engineered small cars on the usual crash tests (including IIHS's main efforts) in judging their safety.AIG scandal aside, I've long assumed that my insurance company (if not insurance companies in general) does a terrible job of disentangling vehicle and driver effects. When I gave up my 1998 BMW M3 for a 2001 Honda Prelude with 45 fewer horsepower and barely 55% of the sticker price, my insurance premiums increased — not unlikely because Preludes were favored among fast-driving youth whereas the venerable E36 M3 was (a few trust-fund babies aside) actually favored among low-risk guys going early-middle-age-crazy (like me). So I was not dinged when I traded-in the 'Lude on an E46 330Ci, and I found that the subsequent Lexus was treated as if I were the little old lady from Pasadena; the Fit, on the other hand, is taken to be a greater risk despite its comparative dirt-cheapness. It may not help that the insurance company calls the car a 2-door notwithstanding that there's no such thing as a 2-door Fit.So: insurance companies are stupid and their trade association doesn't know what's good for them. It perhaps goes without saying that some of the other statistics they deploy — high accident and fatality rates in minicars relative to the general automotive population — aren't worth a bucket of spit unless they've carefully controlled for driver effects (cheap cars are driven by the relatively young) and usage patterns (minicars are citycars and used in collision-rich environments). Screw them and I suppose I'll take my medicine in 5 months when the car insurance renewal comes in.-------------------(*) IIHS correctly observes that the minicars' mileage, at least with U.S.-spec drivetrains, is good but not spectacular. The Fit's main virtue is in the efficiency with which it encloses space given its exterior dimensions and its lack of the small SUV's excess poundage and middle finger waved in the face of aerodynamics.