I'm with cbarry on this one
Notwithstanding that I personally find autolocking doors to be one of
the most annoying "features", I think you'd be hardpressed to find a law enforcement or emergency services agency stating that it's safer to
always have your doors locked for the reasons cbarry mentioned, and that I can corroborate w/8 years of police agency experience. Of course, I've been out of that for almost 10 years, so maybe there's new news that I don't know about -- but I highly doubt it. Then again, maybe you're asking the NYPD and I am relating the suburban perspective.
Obviously, it might be safer on some city streets (esp at stoplights); it's definitely safer in "bad" neighborhoods. I personally like to decide
myself when my doors should be locked (or not) depending on the circumstances.
I would hardly characterize prying open a locked door with the "jaws-of-life" or breaking windows with axes or batons as easy as "tearing a piece of paper", nor would I accept that the time to extract someone is the same for locked vs. unlocked doors. That simply is not the case.
I am not sure which car manufacturers state the doors are more likely to remain closed in a collision when they are locked. Certainly the doors must meet certain federal crash safety standards whether locked or not, don't they? In addition, although I'm not a locksmith nor an engineer, I believe locking the doors really just disables the internal/external handles but does nothing to the latching mechanism itself -- it's not like deadbolting the front door to your house.
I know that BMW's have a
very cool feature that automatically unlocks the doors in the event of an airbag deployment (and it automatically activates the hazards, too). Since airbags deploy within milliseconds of a collision, this would indicate to me that at least BMW doesn't believe the doors should remain locked.
Finally, the "child safety" locks on the back doors of many automobiles will not allow the door to be opened from the inside
regardless of whether they are locked or not. That is certainly the case on the MDX.
I'd like to see some links re: any studies or articles saying it's safer to lock doors all the time, in addition to anything you might have found/read on the greater propensity of doors to fly open when unlocked. To tell you the truth, I couldn't find anything -- supporting either your perspective or cbarry's/mine -- online
