It seems that every summer, winter, and spring break, there is a church or school group somewhere that is en route to doing something wonderful for a community that gets involved in an accident involving their mode of transportation. What starts out as a way of representing a school in a positive way or helping a community mend itself nearly always turns into a tragedy. Through no fault of their own, the school or church groups fall victim to the inadequacies of their 15-passenger vans.
15-passenger vans were developed by the auto industry to respond to the needs and wants of larger groups. They are and were based on the chassis of the large vans that are frequently used by dry cleaning services, plumbers, and others to tote around tools and dry cleaning to their customers. In this case, the vans are effective and perform their job commendably.
Unfortunately, when the car companies decided to turn these vans into passenger vehicles as well, they did not stop to think about weight distribution and how adding 15 passengers to one vehicle could be a problem.
As a result of their lack of care, the vans are extremely dangerous. It does not take much to send these vehicles into a role that nearly always ends poorly. The biggest problem for 15-passenger vans is that they are too top heavy. The vans themselves are too high off of the road for the weight they carry with them. Another problem is that the axels are too narrow. This combined with their height makes them likely to role even when empty.
Another huge problem with the van is that all of the engine's weight is placed very far forward. There is not much weight in the rear axels holding them to the ground. So when 15 people and their luggage and stuff are added to the van, the driver is much more likely to lose control of the van.
The vans are also hard to steer when they are loaded with people and luggage. This means that a driver, who doesn't have to have any sort of special license, is likely to make a correction when going around a curve. Drivers of all vehicles commonly overcorrect. When the overcorrection is done to a 15-passenger van, the van swerves which sends the weight that is too high off of the ground hard to one side of the van. This causes it to roll fairly easily.
