How safe is a 4WD?

From South Africa comes a remarkable set of images from Koos Best, which I am reproducing here with his kind permission.

What you can see is a Land Rover Discovery 3, one of the G4 Challenge spec vehicles.  It's recognisable as a Discovery 3 even if the G4 colour wasn't a giveaway.

The pile of metal next to the Discovery was, at one point, an Audi A4. 

Inside the Discovery was a family of four.

Inside the Audi was a single driver, doing over 200km/h.  He lost control and veered into the Discovery 3 which was travelling in the opposite lane.

The Audi driver's vital organs were removed from the roofrack and engine bay of the Discovery. 

The driver of the Discovery suffered a broken arm.  His wife's leg was shattered and the two girls in the back have knee cap and shoulder injuries.

All of the Discovery occupants were wearing their seatbelts, and if there's one lesson to learn from this, it'd be wear yours.  All of a modern car's safety systems are designed on the assumption you're wearing your belt.  The airbags are marked "SRS", which means Supplementary Restraint System.  That would be supplementary to the seatbelt, and modern seatbelts have pretensioners and all other sorts of tricks beyond just a pure restraint.

The Discovery, as you can see, is remarkably intact, but a bit shorter than designed.  It's a shame such a beautiful car had to die, but it died in the noblest of causes, protecting its precious human occupants.

The Audi's engine and gearbox entirely seperated from each other and the car.  I don't know if the Audi driver was wearing a seatbelt, but looking at the wreckage I'm not sure it would have made any difference.

So remind me, what's this about 4WDs being unsafe?

And by the way, the Ford Ranger 4WD ute has just scored a 5-star safety rating which is one better than the Discovery 3.  Oh, and the Ranger has a seperate chassis, you know the sort that apparently doesn't crumple well or protect occupants.  Ditto for the VW Amarok ute.

 Related links

• Discovery 3 & 4 Roadtest
• Discovery 3 Offroad Setup
• How modern vehicles should be designed for overlanding