Pablo Escobar's 'Cocaine Hippo' Gets Killed In SUV Collision: Are Large Vehicles The Apex Predator On The Road?

Hippopotamuses aren't typically associated with South America, but Colombia has been hosting the animals as an invasive species since the drug lord Pablo Escobar imported them in the eighties. Now one of the descendants of that thunder has been killed after it collided with an SUV.

What Happened: The animal died in a collision with the SUV late Tuesday, reported Associated Press.

The report noted that the crash highlighted the danger that the animals, which can weigh up to 2 tons, posed to motorists on the road.

Despite hitting the Hippo, the occupants of the vehicle were unharmed in the accident. The animal was removed afterward to be analyzed by environmental authorities, according to the Press.

Interestingly, the Escobar hippo was also featured by motoring journalists Jeremy Clarkson, James May, and Richard Hammond in the third season of "The Grand Tour's" two-part Colombia special.

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Why It Matters: While the hippo incident reflects the relative sturdiness of large vehicles such as SUVs, there has been lately some debate on the dangers they pose to people on the roads.

A paper titled "Effects of large vehicles on pedestrian and pedal cyclist injury severity" published in September 2022 in the Journal of Safety Research noted that children are eight times more likely to die when struck by an SUV compared to those struck by a passenger car. 

The authors of the paper Mickey Edwards and Daniel Leonard found that SUVs were overrepresented in fatalities relative to the proportion of their involvement in crashes when it came to the data they analyzed.

The authors said that SUVs struck 14.7% of the pedestrians and pedal cyclists in their data set. However, vehicles were involved in 25.4% of the fatalities.

The weight alone is not the only danger that SUVs pose. On Thursday, The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety said in a report that SUVs cause more severe injuries to bicyclists because their tall front ends hit bicyclists higher on their bodies.

"SUVs tend to knock riders down, where they can also be run over, rather than vaulting them onto the hood of the vehicle," said Sam Monfort, the lead author of the study.

"That's probably because the higher front end of an SUV strikes the cyclist above their center of gravity."

IIHS noted that fatal bicycle crash rates have risen dramatically in the United States over the past 10 years from 621 in 2010 to 932 in 2020. The body attributed this rise to the possibility that SUVs dominate the U.S. vehicle fleet.

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