The Only Car Big Enough To Survive Your Neighbor's Kid

Somewhere out there, a father has decided that the safest thing to hand a newly licensed teenager is an old F-150 or an Excursion. The logic is straightforward: mass wins crashes, so pile on the mass. The counterargument, raised by plenty of people reading The Autopian, who saw the rapidly circulating social media post, is that a driver with roughly 40 hours of experience piloting a three-ton truck is its own hazard.

If that is the game everyone is playing, then the rest of us need to armor up too. Here is the mechanism, taken to its logical conclusion.

The dad who wants a truck for his kid is not wrong that size matters in a collision. He is wrong that this stops with him. Once one family decides mass is protection, the next family notices, and the escalation follows the same pattern as any other arms race. One side grabs a knife, the other grabs a gun, and eventually somebody wants a Howitzer-sized car. European SUVs like the X7 keep growing, but they still will not out-mass domestic pickups. So the trajectory only points one direction: up.

It was not always this way. Automotive safety once lived in engineering rather than curb weight. The early '70s produced a wave of safety car concepts, most of them homely. Malcolm Bricklin's SV-1, short for Safety Vehicle One, packed 10-mph bumpers, a built-in roll cage, an isolated gas tank, and gullwing doors that would not open into traffic. Bricklin's designer Herb Grasse, formerly of Ford, managed to make it look decent.

For decades, the "safe car" in affluent suburbs was a boxy Mercedes sedan or a Volvo 245DL wagon, and later a Mercedes E-Class or a Volvo 850. Those owners believed their comparatively modest Swedish estates would protect them better than a domestic barge. That thinking is being replaced by the caveman approach: just make it bigger.

If bigger truly is better, the honest endpoint is a semi. Volvo already builds one, the VNL tractor, and it makes a fine starting point for the ultimate protective family wagon. Nothing forward of the B-pillar needs to change, because it is aerodynamically refined European design already, engineered for efficiency.

The cabin is posh, even if the wood trim is as plastic as a credit card. And you will not be rowing through an 18-speed Eaton manual on your way to Whole Foods. The VNL offers an automatic controlled by a simple wiper-style stalk, which in theory makes it easier to drive than a six-speed Miata, right up until you try to park it or navigate Boston.

Behind that cab sits an enclosed body with four traditional doors and roll-down windows. Three rows of forward-facing seats match any full-size American SUV, then beat them on head count. The front holds two massive seats, the second row three captain's chairs with a walkway to the back, and the third row seats up to four across.

Satire aside, the escalation has an off-ramp. The IIHS and Consumer Reports teen vehicle list recommends cars with a curb weight above 2,750 pounds, good small-overlap crash ratings, and standard automatic emergency braking, with recommended used models starting under $5,000. Before you buy any used vehicle, run the VIN or plate for open recalls. Mass is not the only safety metric, and it never was.

[Image: Ford, Volvo]

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