What You Need to Know About Pickup Trucks and Safety

Pickup trucks have one or two basic safety advantages but a surprising number of disadvantages.

Jump to a section below:

• Safety Advantages
• Safety Disadvantages
• Four-Wheel Drive
• Safety Features
• Children in Pickups
• Young Drivers and Pickups

Safety Advantages: Goliath vs. David

The advantages are in terms of passive safety — when a collision occurs. They include the trucks' weight and height. Most motorists recognize that a heavier vehicle fares better in a crash with a lighter one, all other things being equal (which they seldom are). A pickup's height relative to other vehicles also gives it an advantage in that it meets bumper-to-bumper with other trucks. In a collision with a lower car, the truck typically comes out on top — sometimes literally. So-called crash incompatibility means the truck can ride up over the car's floor pan, its most solid structure, bypassing the car's crumple zone and plowing into the occupant compartment. The best scenario for both vehicles is for their crumple zones to engage each other and absorb the crash energy as much as possible. Still, the car almost always loses. So overall, a pickup's two main safety advantages come at the expense of other vehicles.

Safety Disadvantages: Goliath vs. Physics

Most of the pickup truck's safety disadvantages involve active safety — the ability to avoid a collision in the first place. Pickups' weight gives them longer stopping distances than cars. Their size and construction makes them less nimble and capable of avoiding collisions. Though their center of gravity generally isn't as high as that of a fully enclosed sport utility vehicle, pickups are still more prone to rollovers than are cars.

A pickup truck's typically lopsided weight distribution is an inherent shortcoming. When the cargo box is empty, most of the weight is in the front — yet the drive wheels are in the rear. (For the purposes of this safety examination, all pickup trucks have rear-wheel drive as a base.) This requires the lighter end to push the heavier end, which leads easily to fishtailing on slick road surfaces. The remedies are far from perfect. Adding weight to the cargo floor above the rear axle can help, but it requires foresight. The added weight can either improve braking or extend the stopping distance; one can't predict which.

Most of today's pickup trucks, including GMC's compact Canyon, have four-wheel antilock brakes.

To this end, pickups should be equipped with four-wheel antilock brakes. Fortunately, they're standard on all new pickups except Dodge's Dakota and Ram 1500, which have two-wheel ABS standard. This isn't good enough, in part because modern ABS also provides electronic brake-force distribution between the front and rear wheels. It apportions the right amount of braking to the rear wheels depending on the cargo load, which can vary profoundly in a pickup. Fortunately Dodge offers four-wheel ABS as a stand-alone option for about $500.

Pickups can be driven safely, but they can't be driven like cars. Even in favorable weather and traction conditions, heavy, high-riding trucks have limitations.

Four-Wheel Drive

Four-wheel drive mitigates one problem: a lack of traction at the rear wheels. However, there are many drawbacks:

• The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's Rollover Ratings reveal a higher overall likelihood of rollover in pickups equipped with four-wheel drive. In the Highway Loss Data Institute's real-world figures, rollovers in 4x4 pickups are more severe or somehow more deadly: Single-vehicle rollovers in 4x4 pickup trucks accounted for 46 percent of 4WD-pickup fatalities in 2003. For 4x2 pickups, the percentage of fatalities from rollovers was 30.
  
  
• Overwhelmingly, pickups have the simplest, part-time four-wheel-drive design that must be activated manually. An unexpected patch of snow or ice will have the same effect on a 4x4 in rear-drive mode as it would on a 4x2.
  
  
• Even when engaged, part-time four-wheel drive is far from ideal. It's a "dumb" system, incapable of transferring torque only to where it's needed. It also should not be used on dry pavement. Doing so can cause damage and increase the chance of rollover.
  
  
• The added hardware is in the front, further imbalancing the weight, which can exacerbate the unexpected-snow-or-ice scenario listed above.
  
  
• The four-wheel-drive system's added weight extends stopping distances.

Safety Features

In terms of the safety feature offering, pickups once again lag most other vehicle types. As mentioned above, four-wheel ABS is now standard on almost all pickups, but it ends there.

General Motors' StabiliTrak electronic stability system is standard on the Cadillac Escalade EXT.

A fraction of the pickup models sold in the United States offer electronic stability control, which helps keep the vehicle on the intended course in low-traction situations. It also minimizes some of the conditions that can lead to rollover. Stability systems are offered on the following pickups:

• Cadillac Escalade EXT (StabiliTrak)
• Chevrolet Avalanche (StabiliTrak)
• Nissan Frontier (Vehicle Dynamic Control)
• Nissan Titan (Vehicle Dynamic Control)
• Toyota Tacoma (Vehicle Stability Control)
• Toyota Tundra (Vehicle Stability Control)

Likewise, side-impact airbags are less common in pickup trucks, with only Nissan and Toyota offering both types: the conventional side-impact airbags for front-occupant torso protection and side curtain-type airbags that cover the side windows. The airbags are available on the following pickups:

• Cadillac Escalade EXT (torso only)
• Chevrolet Avalanche (torso only)
• Chevrolet Colorado (curtain only)
• Chevrolet SSR (torso only)
• Dodge Dakota (curtain only)
• Dodge Ram (curtain only)
• Ford Explorer Sport Trac (curtain only)
• GMC Canyon (curtain only)
• Nissan Frontier (curtain and torso)
• Nissan Titan (curtain and torso)
• Toyota Tacoma (curtain and torso)
• Toyota Tundra (curtain and torso)

For the sake of argument, pickup trucks' higher stature better protects them when struck in the side. (HLDI data shows that occupant fatalities from side impacts are considerably fewer in pickups than in cars.) Still, many of the other vehicles on the road are as high or higher, and side-impact airbags are well worth having. Curtain airbags have proven effective in preventing occupant ejection from the vehicle, particularly in a rollover. The Nissan pickups automatically deploy the curtains on both sides when they detect a rollover. While Ford offers a similar feature on its SUVs and Explorer Sport Trac SUV/pickup "crossover," it hasn't migrated to all of its pickups.

Children in Pickups

For child safety, pickups again are less than ideal. No child — or adult or animal — should ever be carried in a pickup's cargo bed, be it covered or uncovered. Even a modest evasive maneuver can spell death for the passenger. The risk to a passenger in a cargo area is 10.4 times that of other occupants involved in collisions, according to the HLDI. More than 20 states have outlawed the practice, and that number is likely to increase.

The safest place in a vehicle for a child is in the center of the backseat. The problem with pickups is that most of them have no backseat or have one that's too small or faces the wrong way. Extended-cab pickups may not have enough room for a child-safety seat, either overall or in terms of the seat cushion, which must support every inch of the seat's base.

Small pickups sometimes have jump seats that face sideways. Even if one could secure a seat here, it's unsafe for any occupant to face sideways in a moving vehicle.

The list continues. Child seats can be difficult for a parent to install properly due to the vehicle's height and the top-tether anchor's design. In some extended- and crew-cab pickups, the top tether must be passed through a loop atop the backrest and fed downward to a separate ring. This ostensibly gives enough slack to tension the strap properly.

Though some pickups still include a manual front passenger airbag cutoff switch (pictured), newer models use a sensor-based, automatic system.

Because children don't belong in the front seat, a regular-cab pickup (or an extended cab with too small a backseat) is the worst option. The only acceptable exception is if the passenger airbag (front and side, if equipped) is deactivated. Older designs may offer a key switch that disables the airbag. More recent models have begun to adopt the Occupant Classification System that will soon be required on all vehicles. Using weight sensors, it determines if the passenger is heavy/large enough for the airbag to deploy and, in some cases, how forcefully it does so.

Young Drivers and Pickups

Having become image vehicles, pickup trucks have taken on the role that muscle cars held when many of today's parents were teen drivers. In terms of safety, this isn't much of an improvement. Yes, the trucks are heavier and higher, but they're less controllable and more prone to "single-vehicle" accidents, which means the vehicle crashes without coming into contact with another vehicle. A loss of control, leaving the road and rolling over all qualify.

Teen drivers have the highest death rate of any group, and the crashes in which they are involved are disproportionately single-vehicle. Fifty-nine percent of all pickup-truck fatalities result from single-vehicle accidents, second only to SUVs at 63 percent. Put these HLDI statistics together with a lack of experience and the youthful delusion of immortality and you have a recipe for disaster. Sorry, kids. You'll be safer in a Camry.