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Comparing Safety Performance of American, European, and Asian Vehicles in Fatal Accidents (303453)
*Xiaoyi Zhou, University of Southern CaliforniaStereotypes posit that, safety-wise, Asian vehicles are the least reliable, American vehicles are better, and European vehicles are the safest. As far as we know, no publications have compared across vehicles originated in the US, Asia and Europe with respect to their safety performance when involved in fatal accidents.
This study aims to examine the performance of vehicles with different continent of origin in two-vehicle accidents. At least one of the two vehicles involved in the accident has a fatally injured driver. A total of 94,666 fatal accidents (189,332 study subjects) are examined using data from the Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) from 2004 to 2011. The two vehicles involved in each accident are treated as a matched case-control pair where the case is the vehicle with the fatality and the control is the vehicle with the driver that survived. A conditional logistic regression model is used to model the relationship.
The continent of vehicle brand is significantly associated with risk of fatality (p<0.001). Specifically compared to American vehicles, the fatality odds ratios are OREuro=0.72 and ORAsia=1.61.