On a warm Alberta summer's night in 2004, Ted Bosse received the news that would change his and his wife Teresa's lives forever. The all terrain vehicle their son Chris had been riding flipped, leaving him lying critically injured on the road.

By the time that Ted Bosse got to his son, it was clear that Chris wasn't going to survive. His father held him but he was already gone. Chris was sober and an experienced ATV driver. The road he was driving on was flat.

"You wouldn't expect (the ATV) to tip over," said Teresa Bosse, Chris' mother. "They can be very dangerous and I think that their power and their instability, or their danger, is underestimated," she said.

Chris was one of the 2.5 million Canadians who, according to the Canada Safety Council, ride ATVs. The four-wheelers, used in farming and forestry, are also a favoured recreational vehicle in rural areas across Canada. But the Bosses are part of a growing number of Canadian families grieving for loved ones killed in ATV accidents, many of them roll-overs. Every year, more than 150 Canadians are killed in ATV related accidents. Thousands more are injured.

"I would really like to see all ATVs removed," said Kathy Belton, the Associate Director of the Alberta Centre for Injury Control."Most people -- they assume that a product that is bought or sold in Canada is a safe product. And these are not safe products," she said.

But in Canada, there are virtually no government equipment safety standards and some provinces have no helmet laws or minimum age requirements for ATV drivers.

Alberta is a hotbed of ATV accidents. Every year more people are injured in ATV accidents there than in any other province or territory. What's more, 117 people have died in ATV accidents in Alberta since 2002. The province has no mandatory helmet law, even though Luke Ouellete the province's health minister, promised legislation more than a year ago, his government has yet to deliver.

"These fatalities on ATVs -- I believe one is too many," said Ouellette, in an interview with W5. "At the same token we have to make sure that whatever we bring in as a regulation or legislation is very effective and enforceable."

Few regulations

Although some of Canada's provincial governments do set age restrictions on ATVs, consumer and safety protection advocates have called for stricter standards. This past September, the Ontario Medical Association, released a report that stated, "With a high center of gravity, narrow track width and short wheel base, ATVs are somewhat unstable." The OMA recommended banning children under 14 from driving ATVs at all. Even diehard ATV enthusiasts recognize the dangers of driving these machines. Andrew Ryeland, who operates Bear Claw Tours -- one of Canada's largest ATV tour companies near Parry Sound, Ontario, said, "If you upset the ATV and it falls on top of you, there could be some serious consequences -- you can break bones, you can burn yourself on things like the mufflers and the worst case obviously -- it can cause death."

American standards

ATV safety and the stability of the vehicles first came to the attention of the United States Consumer Product Safety Commission more than 20 years ago. The CPSC took legal action against ATV manufacturers claiming in legal filings that the machines presented an "imminent and unreasonable risk of death and severe personal injury" and accused them of promoting "an illusion of stability."

In response, American ATV manufacturers agreed to minimum safety standards including lateral stability. Essentially, the industry agreed not to build any ATVs that were more prone to tip than the least stable model already sold. A complex mathematical formula determined a minimum lateral stability or Kst value of 0.89. That standard was also applied in Canada on a voluntary basis.

Testing tippiness

With so many ATV injuries and deaths in Canada still resulting from roll-overs, W5 wanted to see if modern ATVs would meet that 21-year-old standard for tippiness. That involved renting eight commonly available ATVs in Edmonton and taking them to the Mechanical Engineering department at the University of Alberta, for lateral stability testing by David Checkel, a Mechanical Engineering professor at the University for over 25 years.

Prior to Checkel's testing, the ATVs were given a thorough checkup by a licenced mechanic, to ensure that there were no mechanical defects and that the machines were unmodified. Several ATVs that were rejected and removed from the testing, were replaced.

Next, assisted by a team of engineering students, Checkel measured every ATV, weighed them and then re-measured them. Then using a complex mathematical formula to calculate lateral stability or Kst value, Checkel determined whether or not the ATVs met the Kst 0.89 standard.

All the ATVs passed, except the very last machine tested, a Kawasaki's Brute Force 650 that tipped at Kst 0.81, well below the 0.89 stability standard.

W5 provided this test result to the Canadian Off-Highway Vehicle Distributors Council. Bob Ramsey, who is president of COHV, speaks for ATV manufacturers in Canada. In an interview with W5's Paula Todd, Ramsey said that he doubted Checkel's figures.

In a subsequent letter to W5, Kawasaki criticized Professor Checkel's calculations and noted that the ATV that he tested had an optional winch installed, implying that this may have skewed the results.

Kawasaki also hired a testing firm, Dynamic Research, Inc., to take measurements and test its own Brute Force 650. Using their own different calculations, DRI found that, contrary to Checkel's findings in the W5 testing, their machine exceeded the 0.89 stability standard and the correct Kst value was 0.92.

In response, W5 asked Professor Checkel to retest the Brute Force 650. After removing the winch, he re-measured the Kawasaki Brute Force 650 and recalculated the ATV's lateral stabilty value. Without the added weight, the vehicle was even tippier with a lower Kst value than in the original stability test.

In a letter to W5, Kawasaki also maintained that stability measurements are irrelevant, and that crashes are usually due to operator behaviour: "Kawasakai does not believe that a static lateral stability measurement, such as Kst, is relevant or applicable to rider-active, off-road vehicles like ATVs that operate on a variety of terrains," a Kawasaki representative wrote.

Stability or rider error?

Kawasaki's position is consistent with that of the ATV industry as a whole, which has long insisted that ATV related deaths and injuries stem from rider errors and that there is no correlation between static lateral stability and risk of injury. Bob Ramsay, president of the Canadian Off-Highway Vehicle Distributors Council told W5, "There is not any sort of safety-related design flaw in an ATV -- rather, it's rider behaviour."

So far, the Canadian government has allowed the ATV industry to continue setting its own standards for vehicle safety and stability.

And while Canada's Minister of Transport, John Baird, has said that he'll consider equipment safety regulations, he's not ready to commit to laws for helmets and age restrictions.

"The government can't have a regulation for every potential problem," Baird told W5. "Most ATV's are in the back country, on private property, off the beaten track. What are we going to do -- have aerial surveillance?"

For Ted and Teresa Bosse, tougher laws can't come soon enough -- even if it's too late for their son, Chris.

"I'd like to see stronger regulations to make them safe and definitely more education about how dangerous they can be," said Teresa Bosse. "It's still painful -- you've lost a very important, loved, cherished member of your family -- and it's always going to hurt."