You sit higher up, so if you hit a large animal, like a moose, you don't risk it coming through the windshield. Having anywhere from 300-700kg coming through your windshield is going to hurt you. But that assumes you hit it.

But like you said, you also run the risk of flipping the car. It would be interesting to see some actual data on this. It's the sort of thing that has been repeated so much that it's easy to make bad assumptions.

Anecdotally, I've almost hit a moose two times. Both times I just completely froze up and slammed the breaks. They jumped out of nowhere, the only reason I didn't hit any of them was just pure luck and timing, and had nothing to do with my ability to react or steer away.

> a smaller car with a strong roof will likely beat a SUV with a weak roof structure.

The latter circumstance feels extremely unlikely considering SUVs are generally engineered to support the higher likelihood of more weight ending up on the roof of the car in the event of a roll-over. I'd be surprised if SUVs had weaker structural reinforcement than equivalent-classed sedans.

But I could be very, very wrong here and wouldn't be surprised if I am.

Good point. on the other hand I don't know how a front impact on the roof line compares to the loads in a roll (but I guess a roll at speed also has a strong horizontal force on the roof). What I remember from studies I saw in the past is that features like sunroofs make some difference. But the "we as lay people don't necessarily know", and intuition going wrong on other scenarios, was why I asked if there is a good source on that.

AFAIK what you want is for the body of the animal not to crash through the passenger compartment.

Taller cars are better in this regard.