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Safety and fuel economy info
FuelEconomy.gov is a government website containing updated Environmental Protection Agency fuel-efficiency estimates for individual vehicles. Statistics for past and current model years are included, and fuel-economy ratings for older models have been updated to reflect current testing standards.
The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) is a nonprofit organization that tests new cars, trucks and SUVs and assigns safety ratings in an attempt to cut down the number of annual losses due to crashes. Vehicles are evaluated based on different impact scenarios, and scores are fairly easy to understand and interpret.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) conducts government-sponsored crash tests of most current vehicles. While its methods differ somewhat from those of the IIHS, the NHTSA website still offers a wealth of information about each vehicle's performance in testing, as well as coverage of vehicle defects and recalls. The NHTSA revised its testing criteria for 2011 model year vehicles, so a good amount of models may not have results under the new guidelines yet. Results from the 2011 model years are not comparable with crash-test results from earlier years.
Truck Trend has an interesting article titled "Comparing Minivans with Seven-Passenger Crossovers/SUVs" in which they compare midsize SUVs with their closest minivan counterparts. The idea is that minivans may be preferable to some shoppers in many cases, and the direct one-to-one comparisons illustrate the key differences between the vehicle types.