At the risk (pardon the pun) of transforming myself from an Information and IT Risk Blog into a Traffic Risk Blog, I’m bringing you this bit of research about SUV drivers’ risk perception. I’ve mentioned risk homeostasis before (in, of course, another traffic-related post).

They found that SUV drivers were 55 per cent more likely to drive with only one hand on the top half of the wheel than drivers of regular cars (Transportation Research F, DOI: 10.1016/j.trf.2006.10.001). “Being in larger, taller vehicles, SUV drivers believe they are safer and possess a lower level of perceived risk than car drivers,” says Thomas.

Steve Dethick of DriveTech, a driver training school in Crowthorne, UK, believes that an SUV’s size is the main problem. “It lulls drivers into a false sense of security that they will survive an impact,” he says.

I dug around on the NHTSA Web site and found a presentation about a study which sought to answer the question, “Why does the data indicate that SUVs are not safer than passenger cars?”

The initial instinct might be to say it’s because any inherent risk reduction related to the size of the SUV is offset by its increased likelihood to roll over combined with increased risk homeostasis on the part of the driver, but I think there’s more to it than that.

I think that it’s a combination of self-selecting populations–people who are confident in their driving ability as a accident risk strategy is avoidance (may or may not be true, but work with me here–see my next point) or who enjoy the act of driving tend, if given a choice, to drive sports car or sport sedan which plays to that interest. People drive SUV’s either because they’re hauling people (aka “distractions” and things) around or because their accident risk strategy is impact mitigation (a bad assumption, as the NHTSA study demonstrates).

Regardless of the real underlying reason, this is yet another example of bad inputs to people’s subconscious risk management strategies producing poor decisions. When managing risk, the quality of the data we base our decisions on can have dramatic impacts.