Auto Accident: The New York Times, "Is the Car Unsafe, or the Driver?"

          One way of reading the new report by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety is that the Mercedes E-Class sedan has the safest design of any car or truck and the two-door Chevrolet Blazer the worst. Another way to read the report, to be released Tuesday, is that E-Class drivers tend to drive more carefully than Blazer drivers.
          The report, which analyzed the driver death rates of 199 vehicle models, gave an uncommon level of specificity for a crash study. The study found that in almost every vehicle class "the death rate for the worst vehicle was at least twice as high as the rate for the best." For instance, among midsize SUV's with four-wheel drive, the Toyota 4Runner had 12 deaths per million registered vehicles annually, compared with 134 for the two-door Ford Explorer.
          But the Blazer - not to be confused with the more recently designed Chevrolet Trailblazer - has also not performed well on crash tests, where driver behavior is not a factor. The SUV received the lowest of four ratings in the institute's frontal crash test and only one out of five stars from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in its most recent rollover test.