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a 2-door more dangerous than a 4-door?

Did you know ? On a car, the number of doors can make the difference, especially in the event of an accident for example. Concretely, what does this change?

In France, the figures for road accidents have been steadily declining for many, many years: with a peak in mortality reached in 1972 and near 18,034 killed, the latest reported figures from 2020 indicates 2,550 road deaths. These low figures are due in particular to many measures that have been applied since the Road Safety was founded in 1982.

But if the deaths on our roads decrease so much, it is also partly due to the passive safety that modern vehicles offer today: recent cars meet ever more demanding safety standards and this translates into a better resistance in collisions and the shocks that the latter can take during accidents, always protecting its occupants.

On the roads, cars with only two doors remain quite rare: in addition to the coupe versions, sports cars and some city cars, the vast majority of vehicles have four real doors.

But concretely, are there differences in security between the two types of vehicles?

Evacuation more difficult?

When an accident occurs, the occupants must be removed from the accident vehicle as quickly as possible, when this is still possible. However, it is on this point that two-door cars often have a poor reputation !

« In the event of a frontal impact, the front doors often do not open after the impact. In the absence of rear doors, it is obvious that the emergency services will have to practice extrication. »Confirms a firefighter in the newspaper Le Progrès.

A damaged 2 doors would therefore be more difficult to manage for the firefighter, because if these two doors are found crushed, it is inevitably necessary to proceed to a extrication.

When an accident occurs, it can quickly cause a fire, hence the need to evacuate a vehicle as quickly as possible and take cover.

2-door cars are therefore not directly more “dangerous” in the event of an accident, but the emergency services can potentially have more difficulty saving its occupants in the event of a collision.

What about passive safety?

If we want to assess the safety of the occupants of a vehicle during an accident, it is necessary to distinguish two aspects: the first concerns the passive safety of the vehicle, i.e. the way the latter takes the collision. The design of a vehicle as well as the deformation of its internal structure is designed to absorb a maximum energy on impact, while keeping the interior intact. The front, rear and side parts are deformable while the passenger compartment is reinforced. The second concerns the active security, which concerns the equipment of the vehicles and the actions of the driver on the car, which have no impact in this comparison.

As regards the passive safety of the vehicle, therefore, no notable differences are observed between the bodies, whether they are 2-door or 4-door.

No notable differences in EuroNCAP tests

Even though the 2-door models are slightly more rigid, this is not reflected in the crash test results published by theEuroNCAP. This organization, created in 1997, is the European New Vehicle Assessment Program. As soon as a vehicle is built and intended for the European market, this independent body performs a series of collision tests and assigns a safety rating for each vehicle.

Thus in these tests, the two types of bodywork are neck and neck: if we take a recent model, a Renault Clio of 2019 in its 2-door version for example, the car obtains a maximum score with the rating of 5 stars / 5 according to the test standards EuroNCAP. Another example at BMW, with the Z4 released the same year, which is a pure 2-door convertible coupe, which collects the maximum rating of 5 stars. Finally, a last model: theAudi A1, tested in 2010 by the body in its 2-door version also achieved a score of 5/5.

If we take classic 4-door models, we obviously find vehicles with the highest score. There are even 4-door vehicles that are less solid than coupes: if we take the very recent Dacia Logan, released in 2021, it obtained a score of 2 stars out of 5, a very low score for a recent sedan model!