You're at a safety advantage in a smaller vehicle more often than not. If you're in an accident going fast enough for the size of your vehicle to matter, you stand a very high chance of getting severely fucked up no matter what you're driving. You need to not be in the accident in the first place, and driving a large vehicle with worse handling, longer stopping distances, and a tendency to roll over does not help.

Your average person is not mechanically inclined enough to assess the safety of vehicles, usually to the detriment of the safety of everybody else on the road. Another example of this is people's perception that they're safer with AWD in snowy conditions when all it's doing is getting the vehicle moving faster and giving the driver the confidence to push it way beyond its ability to brake in those conditions.

> If you're in an accident going fast enough for the size of your vehicle to matter, you stand a very high chance of getting severely fucked up no matter what you're driving.

The most dangerous, a head on collision, will always be safer for the heavier vehicle. It's simple physics.

Rollovers are also extremely bad, and vehicles like the Tahoe have a ~25% rollover risk as assessed by the NHTSA. It's simple physics!

More than anything, you need to just not be in the accident in the first place. Buying a vehicle with dogshit braking and handling characteristics so you can "win" in a crash you could have just avoided is dumb, especially when you consider that you carry that increased rollover tendency every single second you're driving that vehicle.

> Buying a vehicle with dogshit braking and handling characteristics so you can "win" in a crash you could have just avoided is dumb,

Not really sure how you can avoid someone drifting over the line at you...

By doing everything you can to not get in a head-on. Ditch it, land it in a yard, etc. Just about the only thing I wouldn't do is dump it in a flooded ag ditch, but that's a situation most people don't find themselves in. If you're in a city where you have literally nowhere to go, nobody is going fast enough to the point where the size differential between the vehicles is going to matter unless you're in something exceptionally small.

There are multiple times where I've had to drive on the shoulder to avoid people out of their lane and they would have been a hell of a lot scarier than they were if I had to do it in an SUV/truck. I've been in multiple fairly severe vehicle accidents and I can tell you from first-hand experience that you're not appreciably safer in an SUV.

I’ve only ever seen “safety” used as a justification for a decision already made, besides some people who like to “sit higher”.