Your accident illustrates one of the problems with vehicular safety that happens with vehicles of various sizes on the roads. The mass of the vehicle is one thing, and the height of the vehicle is another. The higher chassis of SUVs allows their frame to override the frame of smaller, lower cars, and "spear" the passenger compartment.
What's clear in all of this discussion is that the larger the disparity in size on the roads, the more likely that an "unbalanced" accident (i.e., large vehicle vs. small vehicle) will result in injuries and death to the passengers in the smaller vehicle. This study tells me that the most dangerous cars are going to be the lower-quality small cars; so one of the things that needs to be done is to raise the safety standards for those vehicles.
One of the arguments for higher mandated CAFE standards is that they would "compress" the vehicle size range, leading to an increase in overall safety. That isn't going to happen, so there will have to be advances in other areas. One potential advance would be side impact curtains (version of air bags), but that still won't help a passenger in a small car if the frame of a big car pushes into the passenger compartment. Clearly the most dangerous accidents now are side-impacts, so another facet of this would be to target dangerous intersections (easily determined by accident statistics) and modify them to reduce the chances of side impact collisions.
It's like reducing auto emissions pollution; 10% of the cars contribute 90% of the pollution, so vehicle testing programs for all cars are a big waste of money. Cameras that sample emissions and notify drivers of polluting cars that they are in violation are much more effective. Likewise, to improve vehicle safety, the main focus should probably shift from the vehicle to the intersections that are poorly designed, which leads to bad accidents. I expect that it's probably also a 10-90% situation, where about 10% of the intersections cause 90% or so of accidents with major injury or fatality.