Remember the post last year discussing how a larger waistline may be leading to today’s larger cars? (And, no, we’re not talking about SUVs.) Well, there may be another side-effect to being larger: increased car accidents and fatalities.

Remember the post last year discussing how a larger waistline may be leading to today’s larger cars? (And, no, we’re not talking about SUVs.) Well, there may be another side-effect to being larger: increased car accidents and fatalities.

The RAC Foundation, a charity based in the UK that promotes automotive (motoring) safety, states that overweight drivers have twice the chance of getting in an accident than their lighter counterparts. Reasons range from sleep apnea (temporarily stop breathing) to high blood pressure to diebetes, all which can be caused by obesity.

Worse, many of today’s cars are not built to protect such drivers. Safety equipment, such as seatbelts and airbags, are designed the average person and may not provide enough protection. Finally, it’s much more difficult to extract corpulent drivers from wreckage by rescue crews.

Our take? Safety equipment should be modified to adapt to varying body masses. Dual depth airbags, for example, which can be found in the new Buick Lucerne, determine if the passenger needs a smaller or larger airbag depending on the severity of the crash, seat belt placement, and even where how the passenger is sitting (i.e., farther back from the dashboard, etc.). With today’s telemetics, it would not be difficult to envision a protection system that could determine the mass and shape of the driver and passengers and calculate the best possible protection scenario for air bags and seat belt restraint.