This was beat to death over on TheCarLounge.net, but the results are highly misleading. Tons of cars now have very rigid passenger compartments, the Smart being one of them. As such, the prime cause of injury and death is not cockpit intrusion, it's occupant restraint and mitigation of impact forces.

You'll notice there were no crash dummies in the vehicle tested. If there had been, there's a fair chance they may have broken the belts or still been slammed into the dash from intense stretching of the belts. You can see how badly the belts stretch on the IIHS 40mph offset tests. There also doesn't appear to be good survivability in the footwell area, but again, without a dummy in there, it's hard to know exactly what happened.

The BIGGEST factor however is the lack of adequate crumple zones. Those crumple zones are there to slow the impact of the crash. If you have a maximum of 3 feet of usable crumple zone (about right for a massive collision in a mid-size sedan) then you're not really doing X miles per hour to zero in an instant, you're doing it in the time it takes to cover decellerate over a span of several feet. The Smart has virtually no crumple space. How much structural crumple does it appear to have? I'm not talking how far the flimsy plastic bumper sticks out from the frame, either. It looks like it has maybe 6 inches of usable, structural crumple before you hit that rigid passenger compartment.

Because of this, the g-forces will likely be about 5 times higher when you get in a wreck in the Smart versus a midsize sedan. Even compact sedans like the Civic and Prius should have a good 1.5-2 feet of crumple space at a minimum. That can mean the difference between g-forces that your body can cope with versus having a basal skull fracture where your head rips off the spinal cord, or having your internal organs rip away from their original location and you die of internal bleeding.

Don't get me wrong, I think the Smart is a great car for low speed, high density city use. I'd feel pretty safe driving one in a city where myself and the traffic around me rarely got above 30-35mph. It's no surprise they're incredibly popular cars around London, for example. I would not feel safe driving one in suburban USA however. Give me a new Civic instead.