Roll over: in your SUV, and you want the roof to hold up so you're protected.

In this article the Insurance Institute concludes that vehicle roof strength is crucial to passenger safety in rollover crashes. The Institute notes that some 35 percent of all occupant deaths occur when vehicles roll over; in SUVs that number jumps to 59 percent. The article describes what the federal government requires for roof strength, a requirement that has been in effect since 1973 for cars and 1994 for other passenger vehicles. It is in the process of being upgraded. The Institutes study determined that if roofs of every SUV were as strong as the strongest one tested, about 212 of the 668 deaths that occurred in these vehicles in 2006 might have been prevented. The 2000-2004 Nissan Xterra had the strongest roof while the 1999-2004 Jeep Grand Cherokee had the weakest.