As soaring gas prices push consumers to consider buying smaller and more fuel-efficient vehicles, questions about whether small cars offer enough protection on roads filled with large vehicles are cropping up once again.

But in the years since the last oil shock, automakers have worked to make small cars safer than ever. Their occupants still aren't as protected as those in many larger vehicles, but the latest statistics show small cars have made big gains in safety.

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Small cars, like the Honda Fit, have become safer. They now have side airbags, reinforced steel and other features once available only on larger cars.

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Automakers are equipping them with more protective features, such as side airbags. They are redesigning them to disperse energy generated by a crash away from the passenger compartment. And they are using more new materials, such as high-strength steel, to reinforce the sides.

As a result, the death rate for drivers of the smallest cars dropped to 106 per million registered vehicles in 2006 from 165 a decade earlier, according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.

That means that the smallest cars are now safer than small pickups, a category with 116 fatalities per million vehicles. Death rates in the small car category are on par with fatalities among large pickup drivers.

Still, the driver death rate for very small cars is significantly higher than fatality rates for drivers of vehicles in the safest categories — the largest sedans, with 41 deaths per million vehicles, and the biggest SUVs, with 33 deaths.

"There's an advantage to being larger and heavier," said Adrian Lund, president of Arlington, Va.-based Insurance Institute, an organization funded by auto insurers. "Those are the laws of physics, and they still hold."

While today's small cars are safer than earlier models, he said, "the risk of dying in the smallest car relative to the largest car is still 2-to-1."

According to the latest figures, 32,092 vehicle occupants died in U.S. road accidents in 2006, most of them drivers.

To reduce the risks for small car occupants, automakers are pursuing several approaches. One is to design all vehicles so that they are aligned if they hit each other, avoiding the horrible situations that occurred when trucks literally drove over compacts. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has encouraged efforts to increase so-called vehicle compatibility because of the surge in recent years in the numbers of light trucks on the road. After automakers started redesigning truck and SUV fronts in 2005, lowering them in some cases, fatality rates for car occupants in collisions with trucks fell substantially, according to NHTSA.

Automakers also are equipping vehicles with electronic crash-avoidance systems that can detect an impending collision and take protective measures, such as braking or tightening the seat belts. Many luxury models have such systems, which tend to trickle down the range of vehicles, appearing initially in the largest and most expensive models and eventually reaching the smallest.

In late 2003, Honda Motor Co. established a "safety for everyone" policy promising a core set of protective features in all its vehicles. "The thinking was, everyone deserves safety regardless of the size or price of the vehicle," said John Mendel, executive vice president at American Honda Motor.

"Today, when you're looking at consumers coming out of larger vehicles looking for fuel economy, it adds a level of reinforcement that they're not compromising," he said.