Hi Paraic,

It’s a long-held fallacy that SUVs or 4x4s are safer in a collision than a saloon or hatch — it’s all down to the design of the car and the safety systems fitted. While it’s true that there’s a certain level of physical protection from having more steel around you, being higher up is actually of very little help in an impact. It’s far more important to study the design of the chassis and the safety systems of a given car. The best cars will protect their occupants because they’ve been properly designed and engineered to do so. As for rollover protection, it’s not much of an issue these days. Rollovers initially became worrisome on large, unsophisticated US market cars, largely based on commercial truck chassis, but for a modern SUV it’s not really a problem — for a start, most are based on car-type chassis, with inherently low centres of gravity, while improved electronic stability systems have taken away much of the potential for a rollover.