The director of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Jeffrey W. Runge, who slammed SUVs earlier this year, is set to tell the Senate Commerce and Transportation Committee how he plans to address safety concerns. Yesterday a safety expert from the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers Inc. -- whose members include DaimlerChrysler AG, Ford Motor Co., General Motors Corp., Toyota Motor Corp., Nissan Motor Co. and BMW -- said the government's own statistics show SUVs to be no undue danger.

So [Robert S. Strassburger] yesterday promoted numbers showing that in 2001, the likelihood of dying in an SUV crash was only 3.5 percent higher than the chance of dying in a car crash, because 16.25 SUV occupants were killed for every 100,000 vehicles, compared with 15.7 car occupants.

[Brian O'Neill] added that the other important factor in determining SUV safety is that bigger, heavier vehicles inflict massive damage on smaller cars in crashes. Car occupants have a 50 percent greater risk of dying when a car is hit in the side by an SUV than if it is hit by another car, he said.