Stephanie Mencimer, the writer of this article, ignores one obvious solution
to the problem of SUVs killing people--build a sustainable transportation
system in which people have the option of not having to drive to their
destinations, because they can use public transportation instead.

Tell Terry McAuliffe to work towards making a sustainable transportation
system, with a strong public transportation sector, a priority of Democratic
Party policy. (See paragraph one, below.) (The editing of the first sentence
in the article is by me.)

Tom Mathews,
Transportation Issue Chair,
Sierra Club, Iowa Chapter


Subj:    SUV Mentality article in Washington Monthly
Date:   03-01-07 18:19:06 EST
From:   [log in to unmask] (John Holtzclaw)
Sender: [log in to unmask] (Sierra Club Forum on
Transportation Issues)
Reply-to:   [log in to unmask] (Sierra Club Forum on
Transportation Issues)
To: [log in to unmask]

John Holtzclaw
[log in to unmask]
sprawl and transportation action -- http://www.SierraClub.org/sprawl
----- Forwarded by John Holtzclaw/Sierraclub on 01/07/2003 02:52 PM -----


Bumper Mentality

By Stephanie Mencimer, Washington Monthly
December 20, 2002

Have you ever wondered why sport utility vehicle drivers seem like such
[expletive deleted]? Surely it's no coincidence that Terry McAuliffe,
chairman of the
Democratic National Committee, tours Washington in one of the biggest SUVs
on the market, the Cadillac Escalade, or that Jesse Ventura loves the
Lincoln Navigator.

Well, according to New York Times reporter Keith Bradsher's new book, "High
and Mighty," the connection between the two isn't a coincidence. Unlike any
other vehicle before it, the SUV is the car of choice for the nation's most
self-centered people; and the bigger the SUV, the more of a jerk its driver
is likely to be.

According to market research conducted by the country's leading automakers,
Bradsher reports, SUV buyers tend to be "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 and communities. They are more restless, more sybaritic,
and less social than most Americans are. They tend to like fine restaurants
a lot more than off-road driving, seldom go to church and have limited
interest in doing volunteer work to help others."

He says, too, that SUV drivers generally don't care about anyone else's
kids but their own, are very concerned with how other people see them
rather than with what's practical, and they tend to want to control or have
control over the people around them. David Bostwick, Chrysler's market
research director, tells Bradsher, "If you have a sport utility, you can
have the smoked windows, put the children in the back and pretend you're
still single."

Armed with such research, automakers have, over the past decade, ramped up
their SUV designs to appeal even more to the "reptilian" instincts of the
many Americans who are attracted to SUVs not because of their perceived
safety, but for their obvious aggressiveness. Automakers have intentionally
designed the latest models to resemble ferocious animals. The Dodge
Durango, for instance, was built to resemble a savage jungle cat, with
vertical bars across the grille to represent teeth and big jaw-like
fenders. Bradsher quotes a former Ford market researcher who says the SUV
craze is "about not letting anything get in your way, and at the extreme,
about intimidating others to get out of your way."

Not surprisingly, most SUV customers over the past decade hail from a group
that is the embodiment of American narcissism: baby boomers. Affluent and
often socially liberal, baby boomers have embraced the four-wheel-drive SUV
as a symbol of their ability to defy the conventions of old age, of their
independence and "outdoorsiness," making the off-road vehicle a force to be
reckoned with on the American blacktop.

But as Bradsher declares in his title, this baby boomer fetish is
considerably more harmful than the mere annoyance of yet another Rolling
Stones tour or the endless commercials for Propecia. In their attempt to
appear youthful and hip, SUV owners have filled the American highways with
vehicles that exact a distinctly human cost, frequently killing innocent
drivers who would have survived a collision with a lesser vehicle. Bradsher
quotes auto execs who concede that the self-centered lifestyle of SUV
buyers is apparent in "their willingness to endanger other motorists so as
to achieve small improvements in their personal safety."

After covering the auto industry for six years, Bradsher is an unabashed
critic of sport-utility vehicles and the automakers that continue to churn
them out knowing full well the dangers they pose. He doesn't equivocate in
his feeling that driving an SUV is a deeply immoral act that places the
driver's own ego above the health and safety of those around him, not to
mention the health of the environment. Ironically, and though most
supposedly safety-conscious owners don't realize it, SUVs even imperil
those who drive them.

Road Rodeo
Ask a typical SUV driver why he drives such a formidable vehicle, and he'll
invariably insist that it's for safety reasons ? the kids, you know ? not
because he's too vain to get behind the wheel of a sissy Ford Windstar.
Automakers themselves know otherwise ? their own market research tells them
so.

But Bradsher makes painfully clear that the belief in SUV safety is a
delusion. For decades, automakers seeking to avoid tougher fuel economy
standards have invoked the fiction that the bigger the car, the safer the
passenger. As a result, most Americans take it on faith that the only way
to be safe on the highway is to be driving a tank (or the next best thing,
a Hummer). Bradsher shatters this myth and highlights the strange
disconnect between the perception and the reality of SUVs.

The occupant death rate in SUVs is 6 percent higher than it is for cars, 8
percent higher in the largest SUVs. The main reason is that SUVs carry a
high risk of rollover; 62 percent of SUV deaths in 2000 occurred in
rollover accidents. SUVs don't handle well, so drivers can't respond
quickly when the car hits a stretch of uneven pavement or "trips" by
scraping a guardrail. Even a small bump in the road is enough to flip an
SUV traveling at high speed. On top of that, SUV roofs are not reinforced
to protect the occupants against rollover; nor does the government require
them to be.

Because of their vehicles' size and four-wheel drive, SUV drivers tend to
overestimate their own security, which prompts many to drive like maniacs,
particularly in inclement weather. And SUV drivers, ever image-conscious
and overconfident, seem to hate seat belts as much as they love talking on
their cell phones while driving. Bradsher reports that four-fifths of those
killed in roll-overs were not belted in, even though 75 percent of the
general driving population now buckles up regularly.

While failing to protect their occupants, SUVs have also made the roads
more dangerous for others. The "kill rate," as Bradsher calls it, for SUVs
is simply jaw-dropping. For every one life saved by driving an SUV, five
others will be taken. Government researchers have found that a behemoth
like the four-ton Chevy Tahoe kills 122 people for every 1 million models
on the road; by comparison, the Honda Accord only kills 21. Injuries in
SUV-related accidents are likewise more severe.

Part of the reason for the high kill rate is that cars offer very little
protection against an SUV hitting them from the side, not because of the
weight, but because of the design. When a car is hit from the side by
another car, the victim is 6.6 times as likely to die as the aggressor. But
if the aggressor is an SUV, the car driver's relative chance of dying rises
to 30 to 1, because the hood of an SUV is so high off the ground. Rather
than hitting the reinforced doors of a car with its bumper, an SUV will
slam into more vulnerable areas and strike a car driver in the head or
chest, where injuries are more life-threatening.

But before you get an SUV just for defensive purposes, think again. Any
safety gains that might accrue are cancelled out by the high risk of
rollover deaths, which usually don't involve other cars.

Ironically, SUVs are particularly dangerous for children, whose safety is
often the rationale for buying them in the first place. Because these
beasts are so big and hard to see around (and often equipped with
dark-tinted glass that's illegal in cars), SUV drivers have a troubling
tendency to run over their own kids. Just recently, in October, a wealthy
Long Island doctor made headlines after he ran over and killed his
2-year-old in the driveway with his BMW X5. He told police he thought he'd
hit the curb.

To illustrate the kind of selfishness that marks some SUV drivers, Bradsher
finds people who rave about how they've survived accidents with barely a
scratch, yet neglected to mention that the people in the other car were all
killed. (One such woman confesses rather chillingly to Bradsher that her
first response after killing another driver was to go out and get an even
bigger SUV.)

The tragedy of SUVs is that highway fatalities were actually in decline
before SUVs came into vogue, even though Americans were driving farther.
This is true largely for one simple reason: the seatbelt. Seatbelt usage
rose from 14 percent in 1984 to 73 percent in 2001. But seatbelts aren't
much help if you're sideswiped by an Escalade, a prospect that looms yet
more ominously as SUVs enter the used-car market. Not surprisingly, last
year, for the first time in a decade, the number of highway deaths actually
rose.

No Roads Scholars Here
Bradsher blames government for failing to adequately regulate SUVs, but
doesn't fully acknowledge the degree to which it has encouraged SUV
production by becoming a major consumer of them. Law enforcement and public
safety agencies in particular seem enamored of the menacing vehicles, a
fact on proud display when officers finally apprehended the alleged snipers
in the Washington, D.C., area and transported them to the federal
courthouse in a parade of black Ford Explorers and Expeditions.

Judging from the number of official SUVs on the road today, law enforcement
officials, those most likely to know firsthand the grisly effects of a
rollover, are enthusiastic customers. Like the rest of America, police
departments seem to believe that replacing safe, sturdy cars with SUVs is a
good idea, though it's hard to imagine a more dangerous vehicle for an
officer conducting a high-speed chase.

Government's taste for SUVs isn't limited to cops and firemen. There's
hardly a city in America where the mayor's chauffeured Lincoln Town Car
hasn't been replaced by an SUV. In Virginia, where state officials recently
discovered that SUVs were wrecking their efforts to meet clean-air
regulations, a few noted sheepishly that perhaps local governments should
sell their own fleets, which had ballooned to 250 in Fairfax County alone.
(A Fairfax County official told The Washington Post that public safety
officials needed four-wheel drive and large cargo spaces to transport extra
people and emergency equipment through snow or heavy rain, proof that even
law enforcement officials misunderstand SUV safety records.)

As Bradsher details, because of their weight, shoddy brakes, and off-road
tires, SUVs handle poorly in bad weather and have trouble stopping on slick
roads. What's more, they're generally so poorly designed as not to be
capable of carrying much cargo, despite the space. A contributing factor in
the Ford Explorer-Firestone tire debacle was that drivers weren't told that
their Explorers shouldn't carry any more weight than a Ford Taurus. The
extra weight routinely piled in these big cars stressed the tires in a way
that made them fall apart faster and contributed to the spate of rollover
deaths.

I have a hunch that government officials' justification for buying SUVs is
mostly a ruse for their real motivation, which is the same as any other SUV
owner's: image. Officials can safely load up their fleets with
leather-seated SUVs, whereas using taxpayer dollars to buy themselves, say,
a fleet of BMW coupes would get them crucified (even though Detroit
considers SUVs luxury vehicles and designs them accordingly). Police
departments may claim that they need an SUV to accommodate SWAT teams or
canine units, but there is no reason that Sparky the drug dog wouldn't be
just as comfortable in the back of a nice safe Chevy Astrovan.

The same is true for nearly everyone who drives an SUV today. Of course,
not every SUV owner is gripped by insecurity and a death wish; plenty of
otherwise reasonable people seem to get seduced by power and size (see
sidebar).

But if soccer moms and office-park dads really need to ferry a lot of
people around, they could simply get a large car or a minivan, which
Bradsher hails as a great innovation for its fuel efficiency, safety, and
lower pollution. (And minivans don't have a disproportionately high kill
rate for motorists or pedestrians when they get into accidents.) According
to industry market research, minivan drivers also tend to be very nice
people. Minivans are favored by senior citizens and others (male and
female, equally) who volunteer for their churches and carpool with other
people's kids. But that's the problem. SUV owners buy them precisely
because they don't want the "soccer mom" stigma associated with minivans.

While Bradsher does a magnificent job of shattering the myths about SUVs,
he has a difficult time proposing a solution. Sport utility vehicles have
become like guns: Everyone knows they're dangerous, but you can't exactly
force millions of Americans to give them up overnight. And because the SUV
is single-handedly responsible for revitalizing the once-depressed American
auto industry, the economy is now so dependent on their production that it
would be nearly impossible to get them off the road.

Bradsher suggests regulating SUVs like cars rather than as light trucks, so
that they would be forced to comply with fuel-efficiency standards and
safety regulations. He also proposes that the insurance industry stop
shifting the high costs of the SUV dangers onto car owners by raising
premium prices for SUVs to reflect the amount of damage they cause. But
these ideas, commendable though they are, fall short of a perfect answer.

Clearly, the best solution would be for Americans to realize the danger of
SUVs and simply stop buying them. Social pressure can be a powerful
determinant on car choices, as seen in Japan, the one country where SUVs
have not caught on because of cultural checks that emphasize the good of
the community over that of the individual. There are signs that perhaps
public sentiment is beginning to shift against SUV drivers here, too, as
activists have begun to leave nasty flyers on SUV windshields berating
drivers for fouling the environment and other offenses.

But for a true reckoning to take place, image-obsessed Americans will need
to fully understand the SUV's true dangers, including to themselves,
before they will willingly abandon it to the junkyard. Spreading that
message against the nation's biggest advertiser, the auto industry, will
be tough work. Drivers can only hope that Bradsher's book will cut through
the chatter.

Stephanie Mencimer is a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly.
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