Conscious Choice: The Ugly Side of SUVs

December 2002

The Ugly Side of SUVs

by Mark Harris

I want to make a confession. When I was 16 years old, my mom took me to the bureau of motor vehicles in Ann Arbor, Michigan, to apply for my first driver’s license. I had successfully passed high school driver’s ed (with an instructor named Mr. Carr, no less!) and was now ready for the moment of truth. I tried to play it cool, but I was more eager than anyone knew to get that license. I saw it as my entry into the only land of the truly free — the terrain of the licensed American driver. I envisioned myself soon cruising downtown Ann Arbor, sunglasses on, girls hanging off my arm, waving triumphantly to my sidewalk-bound friends.

Okay, all that cool might have been a little hard to manage in a Chevy station wagon, but it was a start. It was also a step up from having your parents drop off you and your date at the movies.

At the motor vehicles facility, I dutifully drove the family wagon around the orange cones, carefully changed lanes using my turn signal, parallel parked, and performed generally with enough competence to earn my license. I was on my way! Three days later, I was also on my way up to 110 mph behind the wheel of that station wagon. One of my buddies was with me and we had decided to see how fast the car could go out on Highway 94. We revved it up and laughed and yelled and our hearts raced as we soared past the other cars, only slowing down when the chassis began to shake. We thought we were so wild, daring, and radical.

What we really were, of course, was something else — complete, total idiots!

SUV Spin Doctors

Fortunately, we survived, and I never drove anywhere near that fast again. I was reminded of this long forgotten incident the other day as I read New York Times reporter Keith Bradsher’s provocative new book, High and Mighty: SUVs—The World’s Most Dangerous Vehicles and How They Got That Way. I was reminded of the obvious — but I think often forgotten — truth of how powerful and hazardous an automobile can really be. In this country, we’re still inured to the idea of tens of thousands of people dying every year in accidents. Safety awareness has increased over the years, but it’s been a long, uneven struggle. For years, automakers resisted installing seat belts in cars, for example, because they thought it would be bad PR, bringing attention to the fact that you could possibly get hurt in this machine. Why remind people of the negative, the thinking went.

Well, one reason might be to save lives. Now, Bradsher’s book offers a scathing critique of another, more recent negative, the Sport Utility Vehicle (SUV) craze. Here the former Detroit bureau chief for the Times takes to task the entire choreography of special corporate and political interests who’ve colluded to foist these environmentally inferior, less safe vehicles onto an apparently very happy to be foisted upon public. Indeed, High and Mighty is an expose of the machinations of the auto giants on a par with Ralph Nader’s 1960s classic, Unsafe At Any Speed. The book is also a critique of the uniquely American affair with the automobile, the ways we define ourselves through the vehicles we drive, and how the emotions we invest in such things are exploited by the auto industry for maximum profit.

You may have noticed that SUVs are often marketed as "green," whatever that means, as if the capacity for driving off-road (never mind how often anyone actually does!) now somehow defines the environmentally friendly vehicle. Their marketing attempts to appeal to some sort of inner, rugged, go-your-own-way, outdoorsy person apparently lurking in the psyche of every American consumer.

But SUVs are not "green." SUVs are basically just souped-up light trucks, and as light trucks they are also subject to less stringent federal safety and pollution controls than cars. This latter point is actually the whole point. The auto industry has sought to promote SUVs as a way to circumvent the environmental victories of the 1970s that led to tighter industry regulations.

Moreover, SUVs are generally no safer than cars. In fact, they are actually less safe in many important respects, says Bradsher. SUV occupants overall are no less likely to perish in accidents than car occupants, but they are far more likely to be paralyzed. This is because many SUVs models are inclined to rollover during accidents. But compare the largest SUVs to minivans or upper-midsize cars like the Toyota Camry and the death rate for SUV riders goes up 8 percent. By the way, if you’re in another vehicle and you’re hit by a large SUV, you’re also far more likely to be killed.

A Road With a View — Please!

I first noticed last year how more and more frequently I was finding myself stuck behind some huge SUV, unable to see a thing in front of me. So much for defensive driving, watching two or three cars ahead for brake lights. So much for backing out of a parking space confident that the coast is clear, when you’re between two SUVs. Recently, I watched a woman try to get out of a crowded parking lot in Evanston in a Lincoln Navigator. She had to back up then go forward and then back up again five or six times, laboriously maneuvering the car like an inchworm around toward the exit. My thought was, "Why exactly do you want this? You’re living in a crowded urban area!" At least she wasn’t trying to maneuver quickly out of the way of some late-night drunk driver veering into her lane from the other direction. In that circumstance, you’re probably better off in a more agile, less lumbering car.

But apparently many people do want this. Bradsher doesn’t hold back in his view that the first large wave of SUV sales in the‘90s were mostly to what he describes as the more self-absorbed among us, affluent baby boomers in their‘40s. Admittedly, the advertising does seem to appeal to such narcissistic instincts. "Ditch the Joneses," proclaims one ad for the Navigator, the vehicle sitting majestically on a peak against a mountainous wilderness backdrop. "Now growing up doesn’t mean having to become your parents," declares the billboard for another model. What the latter message means exactly is anyone’s guess. Perhaps it’s designed to appeal to those neurotransmitters in our consumer brains where we’re all still 15-year-olds not wanting to get dropped off at the movies by the parents?

SUVs: A Menace to Society?

High and Mighty is a book that, I hope, will receive the wide readership it deserves. Bradsher reminds us that mechanical engineering is as much an environmental issue as organic foods or saving the rain forest. And he has a lot to say on the topic, from the limitations of four-wheel drive, to the inferior drum brakes used in most SUVs, to the issue of rollovers.

He also provides evidence of another, more fundamental problem. In a market-driven economy, private corporate interests overshadow fundamental economic and social policy issues that have profound implications for the quality of life in our communities. In other words, the "genius" of capitalism is that a product can be put on the market first and foremost because manufacturers see the profits to be made. It’s then left to the advertising and marketing people to convince the rest of us that the product is not only what we needed and wanted all along, but —remarkably! — is actually an expression of who we are as individuals, of our personalities and "lifestyles."

If that isn’t dispiriting enough, Bradsher leaves us with something else to look forward to. The saving grace of the baby boomer SUV buyers of the 1990s was that they tended to be the best drivers. In just a few years, however, all those sparkling new SUVs are going to become old, used SUVs, driven by less experienced, younger, and sometimes more reckless drivers. Like a certain 16-year-old "idiot" I recall who once thought it was cool to floor the accelerator.

We can ask the question now: How many more unnecessary deaths will result?

High and Mighty: SUVS — The World’s Most Dangerous Vehicles and How They Got That Way, by Keith Bradsher. (PublicAffairs, 2002, 468 pages.)

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