High and Mighty: Suvs-The World's Most Dangerous Vehicles and How They Got That Way

Before anyone jumps down my throat, I'm going to point out that I own one of the larger SUVs, a 97 Expedition with a 5.4 and a towing package, I use it for my business.

http://www.amazon.ca/High-Mighty-Suvs-Dangerous-Vehicles/dp/1586481231

Few boomers would be flattered by the portrait that auto industry market research has painted of the typical SUV buyer:
"They tend to be people who are insecure and vain. They are frequently nervous about their marriages and uncomfortable about parenthood. They often lack confidence in their driving skills. Above all, they are apt to be self-centered and self-absorbed, with little interest in their neighbors or communities."

(...)

What has made the incredible growth of the SUV marketplace possible, especially in the United States, which largely determines the "standards" for Canada and other smaller economies? Bradsher argues that "a public policy disaster" started almost forty years ago and continued to the point where the whole American economy is now highly dependent on "inefficient, unsafe, heavily polluting SUVs." Bradsher tells how a trade dispute in 1963 between the European Economic Community and the United States over chickens led to a retaliatory tax on imported light trucks that persists to this day. This 1964 tax sheltered Detroit automakers for many years from foreign competitors in the light truck and eventually the SUV market. Bradsher also explains clearly and in detail all the sneaky loopholes that industry and union lobbyists found and won so that bigger and bigger SUVs could be classified as light trucks, freeing them from government regulations which applied to cars in the areas of fuel economy and safety.

(...)

Bradsher issues a clear warning about a future in which there are more SUVs on the road than ever, and used SUVs flood the market so that younger drivers and drivers with poor safety records start using them. Failing brakes and maintenance problems, combined with the inherent safety problems of an unstable vehicle that accelerates easily to dangerous speeds make for a chilling prospect.

Even before it came out I thought SUVs were a stupid idea.

Probably the most disturbing aspect of the book is where he talks about how eventually they will flood the used-car market, and then be driven by the least safe drivers. Oh, and he makes a very strong point that beginning drivers have no business in one.

"They tend to be people who are insecure and vain. They are frequently nervous about their marriages and uncomfortable about parenthood. They often lack confidence in their driving skills. Above all, they are apt to be self-centered and self-absorbed, with little interest in their neighbors or communities."

Well, duh.

"bigger and bigger SUVs could be classified as light trucks, freeing them from government regulations which applied to cars in the areas of fuel economy and safety."

Double duh.

T

Which are a Holy-Jesus-God inefficient as a way to get around town, and ghastly unsafe, and expensive.

That could replace what nature forgot instead of buying a land barge.

so automakers didtched station wagons, and made vans "cool"...next stop SUVs..

We LOVED station wagons..had 4 or 5 of 'em:)

Our van was OK, but not as fuel-efficient as the wagons

Plus a real van (truck based) will carry considerably more weight than a wagon.

& captain chairs that the kids fought over..Ours was before all the electronic stuff, but they still thought it was "way cool"..

Toyota Rav4, etc.?

I had one of the original Subaru 4x4 station wagons, small with good cargo room and it was all but unstoppable in mud or snow. Today it would be classified as a small SUV, at the time it was a wagon.

The small SUVs are kind of off in a class of their own and most of them aren't built like a truck as the larger ones usually are.

and when it does, I'm always glad I have it. This area is very hilly, so driving can be a challenge in the winter. And if we want to go east over the mountains (and we frequently do; it's only a half hour away), then we'd have to chain up if we didn't have four wheel drive. (The other alternative, studded snow tires, wreck the roads in the lowlands, since there usually isn't snow on them.)

I didn't know they made an all wheel drive version..

We don't get snow often enough for most people here to learn how to drive in it, when I had the 4x4 Subie I would routinely drive past big 4x4s that had slid off the road.. Since the Subie was kind of subtle about being 4x4 it used to hack off all the guys (usually guys) stuck in the ditch..

I actually learned to drive in poor traction conditions on the beach, sugar sand is worse than snow for bogging you down, keep the wheels straight and keep moving are the watchwords.

In this case, a RAV-4.

We strongly considered a Subaru Forester as well; I'm not sure how we ended up deciding. I really liked the Subaru's visibility, but I think the RAV had some additional safety features. Anyway, they're both good vehicles.

The RAV is a pretty nice little wagon (I think of those things as wagons really).

Glad it works for you..

"Bradsher devotes one of his best chapters to Clotaire Rapaille, a French medical anthropologist by training, and the leading consultant to the automakers on consumer psychology. The chapter on Rapaille shows how the auto industry exploits consumer irrationality. Rapaille has no respect for our superficial obsession with reason: He begins his "discoveries", as he calls focus groups, by asking subjects to speak for an hour about their rational responses to a vehicle. "They tell me things I don't really care about, and I don't listen." Then he has them spend another hour pretending to be children on another planet, fantasizing out loud about what they might do with an SUV. Rapaille also ignores these responses. The last phase has each consumer lie in near darkness and talk about his or her earliest associations with vehicles, a kind of vehicle Rorschach test designed to elicit a primal or 'reptilian' response to a proposed design. Here is where the truth comes out. Consumers' paranoia about crime and hostility toward their fellow-citizens are deep feelings that can be assuaged in the chalice of an appropriate product.
The psychosexual component of this marketing is pretty clear in the TV ad for the Chevrolet Avalanche that goes "we didn't intend to make other trucks feel pathetic and inadequate, it just sort of happened." The so-called war on terror that began after Rapaille had already established himself as Detroit's leading Freudian obviously fuels SUV sales as well. Irrational fears of crime and violence, a widening gap between rich and poor furthered by tax cuts aimed at the rich, and a decaying public sector all make for a society in which everyone wants to drive high above the road, with tinted windows and a dominating gaze downwards at a frightening world."

dp

I was crossing the street on a light (that I'd waited for, so the car had every chance to see that there was a pedestrian waiting to cross the street). She was coming towards me, from a slight incline, and I don't think she saw me over her hood. It was a horribly close call and I kept replaying it in my mind over and over after that. I screamed, which I think she heard, and then she didn't even stop or apologize - just got in the other lane and zoomed off (I was giving her the finger at the time). They are a menace. And she was coming out of a LIBRARY of all places.

Obviously this isn't always true but it's a fairly good rule of thumb.

I'm not talking commercial vehicles though, strictly private vehicles.

good cargo space. I drive a 2004 Honda Civic, and let me tell you, the trunk is a two, maybe a three body trunk. It actually holds more than the Accord, and has better back seat space.

I also have driven Subaru wagons and loved them, but the Subaru Gods don't like me, and destroy my engines before 80,000 miles have gone by. So far the Honda Gods seem to like me.

with enough head room for my tall husband. So we had a mini-van.

But now the mini-SUV's work fine for him; and are smaller overall than mini-vans.