Growing environmental awareness and the desire to preserve fossil fuels have in the recent past led some automobile manufacturers and a couple of small development teams to consider whether this goal can be achieved through, amongst other things, extremely small and light vehicles.

Because of the low weight, the problem of compatibility - i. e. the affect of a collision with a larger vehicle - becomes particularly acute. Furthermore, the requirement that such vehicles be built as compact as possible contradicts the desire to include conventional deformation zones in the design.

Thus the question arises whether such vehicle should be consciously built with lower standards of passive safety or what expense would be necessary to at least partially compensate these physical handicaps. It has been shown that through consequent application of a sieries of complementary measures, and by using the total physically available space, a thoroughly respectable safety potential can be achieved for small vehicles. However, decreased deformation length of smaller vehicles increases the deformation forces and thus the mass of the vehicle. Therefore extremely short vehicles are not necessarily light vehicles.