forward- re: SUV mentality-

[telebob x]

This from the ever alert Chris Walters.


Bumper Mentality
By Stephanie Mencimer, Washington Monthly
December 20, 2002

Have you ever wondered why sport utility vehicle drivers seem like such 
assholes? 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.
--

                     \!!!!/
                (o o)
          
-------------------------oOOo-(_)-oOOo-----------------------------

                        This is my body
                Up for sale,
                This is my conscience
                Deadly pale,
                This is my sanity,
                Price tag peeping.
                These are my people,
                Why are they weeping?


                        -R. Condon, 'Death Of A Politician'





_________________________________________________________________
Add photos to your messages with MSN 8. Get 2 months FREE*.  
http://join.msn.com/?page=features/featuredemail