Will bigger vehicles lead to bigger claims?

With accident rates climbing, one growing area of concern is that vehicles are becoming much larger.

For example, rapid changes in vehicle specs mean full-size SUVs from 1999 would today meet the gearhead moniker of ‘Cute Ute.’ With sport utility vehicles and pickup trucks gaining in size annually, the laws of physics may soon become a serious threat to loss ratios.

“As these cars have gotten bigger and bigger, and more popular, a line of argument says, ‘Well, if you’ve got many more of these things running around, and they run into each other or something else, they’re going to cause more damage,’” Paul Gilbody, president of ClaimsPro North America, tells CU in an interview.

That damage risk extends to people, property, and smaller cars.

“The more expensive long-term costs involved in car accidents aren’t necessarily the car itself or repairing it. It’s the people and the treatment going with it. When you’re the insurer, not only are you looking at the cost of the car, and putting a particular car back together, you’re also looking at the average data [on the] severity of what it hits,” adds Gilbody.

“Cars are getting safer and safer so, fortunately, people will probably be statistically better off than they would have been 10 years ago with airbags and seatbelt pretensioners and crumple zones. But at the same time, the human body is still the human body.”

Two-wheel worries

To that point, one U.S. study last year found SUVs cause more severe injuries — particularly head injuries — than cars when they hit bicyclists. That’s likely because the large vehicles’ tall front ends strike cyclists higher on their bodies.

“SUVs tend to knock riders down, where they can also be run over, rather than vaulting them onto the hood of the vehicle,” said Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) statistician Sam Monfort, the lead author of the study. “That’s probably because the higher front end of an SUV strikes the cyclist above their center of gravity.”

Ground-impact injuries — a frequent cause of head injuries — were more than twice as common in SUV crashes than those involving cars, the Arlington, VA-based IIHS said in a press release.

The findings follow earlier IIHS research that showed SUVs are more lethal than cars to pedestrians despite design changes that have made them less dangerous to other vehicles.

With files from Jason Contant.

This article is excerpted from one appearing in the February-March 2024 print edition of Canadian Underwriter.

Feature image courtesy of iStock.com/lcodacci