Ford Adds Bars to Make a Large Sport Vehicle Safer

February 27, 1999

Ford Adds Bars to Make a Large Sport Vehicle Safer

By KEITH BRADSHER

EARBORN, Mich. -- Ford Motor Co. on Friday introduced the first design change to make sport utility vehicles a little less dangerous in crashes with cars. It said its newest sport utility vehicle, a behemoth that will be the tallest and heaviest yet made, would be equipped with hollow steel bars mounted below the front and rear bumpers to prevent it from riding over cars during collisions.
The horizontal steel beams hang down six inches from the high-riding steel frame of the vehicle, which is called the Ford Excursion and stands nearly 7 feet tall and weighs more than three tons. Priya Prasad, Ford's top safety researcher, said that if an Excursion without the steel beams collided with the front of a Ford Taurus with both vehicles traveling at 30 miles an hour, the Excursion would ride up over the Taurus' hood.
But with the steel beam in front, the Excursion would only crush the Taurus' front end as far back as the front wheels and would not ride over the hood, leaving the passenger compartment of the Taurus relatively intact, Prasad said. The steel beams are mounted about 18 inches off the ground, the height of car bumpers and the strongest parts of a car's body, so the beams should also reduce somewhat the risk that the Excursion will ride over cars that it hits in the side or the rear, as well as the risk that cars will slide under the Excursion when they hit it.
Any car or other family vehicle hit by an Excursion is still likely to suffer heavy damage. In an interview last April, Prasad said that weight differences caused 60 to 90 percent of the extra deaths and injuries found in collisions between mismatched vehicles. But British researchers have estimated that height differences, which Ford is trying to address, account for three-quarters of the extra damage.
All Excursions sold in the United States will also meet California's criteria for low-emissions light trucks, Ford officials confirmed Friday. This air pollution standard is roughly comparable to current federal standards for tailpipe emissions from cars. Ford had announced in January 1998 that it would voluntarily build all current and future sport utility vehicle models, including the Excursion, to meet the California low-emissions standard rather than continue to use a loophole in federal regulations that allows sport utility vehicles to pollute nearly three times as much as cars.
Safety and environmental advocates still had criticisms Friday of the Excursion, which will go on sale this fall. Safety experts pointed out that the vehicle weighs twice as much as a midsized car and is still likely to do tremendous damage in a crash. The Excursion is built on a stiff, pickup-truck underbody that was originally designed to carry cargo.
Environmentalists said the Excursion's low gas mileage -- as little as 10 miles per gallon in the city with the V-10 engine -- would contribute to global warming and encourage oil exploration in fragile wildernesses. The Excursion has a 44-gallon fuel tank. It has three rows of seats that can seat nine, along with as much cargo room behind the third row as the combined trunk space of three average cars.
The Excursion is not only long and tall but wide -- 80 inches wide, 3.3 inches wider than a Chevrolet Suburban. Indeed, if the Excursion were even a fraction of an inch wider, it would be required by federal regulations to carry special running lights on the roof and the sides as an extra-wide vehicle, said Dan Holden, the vehicle's body engineering manager.
Ford has not yet set a price for the Excursion, but auto analysts expect it to cost close to $50,000.

The Excursion's steel bars and low tailpipe emissions represent a dramatic shift over the last two years in safety and environmental policies at Ford, the world's leading manufacturer of sport utility vehicles. In an interview in October 1997, eight Ford managers contended that sport utility vehicles did not pose extra safety or environmental hazards.
Paul Mayer, the engineering supervisor who oversaw the development of the steel beams, said Friday that the design for the rear beam had been approved in late 1997 while the front beam's design was completed during the first quarter of 1998. Ford also lowered the front end of the Excursion by an inch by adjusting the suspension, so as to make it less dangerous to cars and easier to enter, he said.
Jennifer Flake, a Ford spokeswoman, said the automaker had decided during the fall of 1997 that something would have to be done to reduce the risk that the Excursion would ride over cars. Helen Petrauskas, Ford's vice president for safety and environmental issues, said articles in The New York Times in 1997 about the safety of sport utility vehicles and other light trucks had played a large role in persuading Ford to go to the extra expense of designing and installing extra protection for people in cars hit by the Excursion. "I've got to believe it gave it a big impetus," she said.
Ford's announcement Friday came three days before a conference in Detroit at which safety regulators are expected to blame mismatches between sport utility vehicles and smaller vehicles for thousands of deaths.
According to federal safety regulators, sport utility vehicles are nearly three times as likely as cars to kill the other driver in a crash. But this does not mean that sport utility vehicles are safer for their own occupants: According to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, supported by insurers trying to reduce accident costs, sport utility vehicles actually have a higher death rate for their occupants than cars of similar weight, because the sport utility vehicles roll over more often when they strike curbs, guardrails and other vehicles.
Friday's announcement marks an extraordinary shift in how American automakers approach the design of sport utility vehicles, their most profitable product. Until now, most auto engineers focused only on making each vehicle as safe as possible for its own occupants, and did not look at minimizing injuries to occupants in other vehicles during crashes.
Ford officials said they would consider mounting similar steel beams on other models. But they added that even the Ford Expedition and Lincoln Navigator, both full-sized sport utility vehicles, did not ride as high as the Excursion and therefore might not need the new devices.
Robert Lange, vehicle safety director for General Motors, said GM's Suburbans, currently the biggest sport utility vehicles on the road, rode lower than an Expedition or Navigator and did not require special devices. "It sounds like a pretty good solution for them -- our frame structures were lower to begin with and we don't need that extra 50 pounds," he said.

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