America's Twisted Love Affair With Sociopathic Cars Axle of Evil by Gregg Easterbrook Post date: 01.10.03 Issue date: 01.20.03  High and Mighty: SUVs--The World's Most Dangerous Vehicles and How  They Got That Way by Keith Bradsher (PublicAffairs, 468 pp., $28)  I.  Last fall's sniper attacks in Montgomery County, Maryland, created  gridlock outside public schools, as many parents responded by driving  their children each morning. Sitting in the paralyzed traffic around  my children's middle school during that period, intersections in  three directions blocked by queues of metal, I beheld what modern  transportation trends have wrought. At least half the machines  jockeying for position at the drop-off point were some form of "sport  utility vehicle" (SUV)--a clear mirror of buying trends, since SUVs  and deceptively named "light" pickup trucks now represent half of  new-vehicle sales. Many of the SUVs were huge, twice the size of  regular four-door cars. Drivers of the SUVs were usually the  aggressive ones, trying to barge to the front and cut off the cars of  people who were, after all, the parents of their kids' friends at  school.  What I observed, facing the tonnage of automotive sheet metal lined  up outside Cabin John Middle School in this suburban haven,  represented twenty years of public-policy fiasco. Perverse federal  regulations have actually encouraged auto companies to make SUVs big  and wasteful, creating the very emblem of contemporary selfishness.  Special congressional exemptions permit the vehicles to emit far more  smog-forming pollutants and greenhouse gases than regular cars.  Safety loopholes allow SUVs to be more dangerous than regular cars:  it is a common fallacy that the occupants inside SUVs are safer than  they would be in ordinary cars, and these Godzillas are instruments  of death for non-SUV-driving motorists. Advertising has created the  illusion that owning an SUV has something to do with being outdoorsy  and adventurous, yet hardly any of these vehicles are used off-road,  and the kind of four-wheel-drive systems that many sport to maintain  the off-road fiction are nearly worthless in normal driving  conditions, and even in snow. Still other perverse special favors  have allowed SUVs to have blackout windows, mammoth grill guards,  dazzling headlights, and other features designed to make the vehicles  as aggressive and hostile as possible.  To top off the scandal, the petroleum-waste trends caused by the SUV  and its cousin, the light pickup (which is also exempt from most  safety and environmental rules for regular cars, though millions of  supposedly commercial-purpose pickups are used as cars), keep  American society perilously dependent on Persian Gulf oil, diverting  $20 billion annually to Saudi Arabia and its anti-American  extremists, and $10 billion annually to Saddam Hussein himself. Stuck  in the school-bound traffic, I marveled at the absurdity of our  national situation. The country was preparing to make war with Saddam  partly over his oil, and here was a parade of SUVs brazenly attesting  to the rarely discussed fact that American gasoline stations are  Saddam's financial benefactor. Every time an SUV or light pickup  leaves the showroom in the United States, fanatics smile in the  Persian Gulf.  But it was not the public-policy fiasco of the SUV that was on my  mind that morning so much as the existential fiasco of the SUV. These  vehicles have converted driving from a convenience and sometimes a  pleasure into a nerve-wracking Darwinian battle. Justified as a  response to road rage, SUVs and light pickups are actually the root  cause of it. Can it be a coincidence that road rage started to become  a national concern in the mid-1990s, just as these pharaonic  contraptions began flooding the roads? Can it be a coincidence that  road rage gets worse annually, pretty much in sync with the annual  rise in the percentage of vehicles that are SUVs or pickups? These  machines are designed to bring out the worst in their owners while  simultaneously making them feel that they are invincible. And they  simply take up space, shrinking the road and parking acreage and  increasing all forms of congestion. Traffic studies show that the  typical SUV occupies as much road and parking space as 1.4 regular  cars.  Driving in America has long been leaned on as a metaphor for various  aspects of the national psyche. Now, thanks to SUVs and light  pickups, driving is a metaphor for anxiety-inducing unpleasantness,  petty aggression against neighbors, and profanity-shouting and  finger-flipping during routine daily events. The SUV represents a  pitiable equation of a listless activity--sitting in a chair and  pressing a pedal--with virility. Why don't the automakers in Detroit  realize that they are cooking their own goose with SUVs? Detroit has  spent the years of SUV mania promoting vehicles that cause roads to  become clogged and driving to become insufferable. Surely this cannot  be in the long-term interest of car manufacturers.  Watching my suburban neighbors in the SUV gridlock, I had two other  thoughts. I reminded myself that I know congenial and kind-hearted  people who own these monstrosities. Some bought SUVs because they  were tricked into believing that they are safer than regular cars or  provide better traction--or because most of the media, addicted to  car-advertising revenue, discreetly avoid reporting on how SUVs kill.  Other kindly SUV owners simply went along with a fad. Lots of nice  people have fallen for the SUV, one reason that it has become  ubiquitous.  I also reflected that of all the causes taken up by well-educated  people of the middle and upper middle classes--the same demographic  that gave money to Al Gore and voted for him decisively in the last  presidential election--the scandal of the SUV is not on the list. SUV  buyers are disproportionately prosperous and well-educated, since  most SUVs cost more than regular cars. Well-educated and prosperous  people seem to have no complaints about SUVs because they believe  that the fad benefits them: perhaps because they think that SUVs make  them safer, or perhaps because SUVs satisfy some deep private need.  Maybe some of these fine people privately long to bellow at the world  to get out of their way.  Keith Bradsher covers much of this ground in his dazzling book, a  history of the SUV and the public-policy disaster that swirls around  it. The former Detroit bureau chief of The New York Times, Bradsher  writes with knowledge and confidence. His book is a masterpiece of  its kind, splendidly combining reporting, analysis, and indignation.  It belongs on the same shelf as Ralph Nader's Unsafe at Any Speed and  Ida Tarbell's The History of Standard Oil, chronicles of the  dangerous interaction of corporate perfidy and regulatory breakdown.  High and Mighty tells us more than we may care to know about how  government malfunctions, and about the more disturbing aspects of the  American cult of driving.     II.  Americans have always loved large cars--well, almost always, and this  brings us to the birth of the SUV. Following the oil crunch in 1973,  gasoline was much more expensive in real-dollar terms than it is  today, and Congress imposed fuel-economy standards on passenger  vehicles. These factors combined with Detroit's severe  quality-control problems of the 1970s and the advent of high-quality  Toyotas, Hondas, and Datsuns to make smaller cars fashionable during  the late 1970s and early 1980s. Buyers were abandoning land yachts  for nimble small or mid-size vehicles. Detroit needed a new  large-vehicle product to help reverse its declining market share.  At about the same time, the old American Motors company was making a  push to market its Jeep brand as a vehicle for everyone, not just for  backwoodsmen. The company was in financial trouble. Bradsher reports  that its lobbyists told officials of Richard Nixon's newly created  Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that if the company went under,  they would blame the anti-pollution rules of the newly passed Clean  Air Act. So the EPA wrote a waiver that essentially exempted Jeeps  from anti-smog regulation, on the grounds that they were not cars but  "light trucks." That trucks should get a pass on clean-air rules was  itself something of an absurdity. Ostensibly the provision was to  protect business, but since the deadweight cost of pollution control  is the same from the standpoint of the economy regardless of whether  the price is imposed on individuals or on businesses, the distinction  never made much sense. In any event, Jeeps were issued a free pass.  You can guess what followed. Other manufacturers demanded free passes  for anything even vaguely truckish, including light pickups.  Automakers rushed to create a new class of large vehicles with  obscure design elements (such as the option of ordering a model with  panel sides instead of rear side windows) that allowed manufacturers  to claim that they were trucks, even if they were plainly intended  for use as cars. To this day, every SUV and light pickup sold in the  United States is allowed to emit substantially more smog-forming  pollutants than regular cars. Dramatic action against this problem  was supposedly taken during the Clinton administration--but the  dramatic action in question was to extend the free pass to the year  2009, when SUVs finally, at least in theory, must meet anti-pollution  standards.  All the decent people who buy SUVs in the conviction that they are  safe or chic should recognize that their vehicles are  pollution-spewing hogs. Regular cars, for which antipollution  controls are extremely strict, get cleaner every year, so much so  that smog should be declining rapidly in most cities. But smog  decline has slowed in the last decade, and the reason is the SUV. The  Washington, D.C. metropolitan area, for example, was expected ten  years ago to be off the EPA smog-problem list by now because the  trend in pollution from regular cars was sharply down; but so many  smog-emitting SUVs have invaded the area, bringing their  anti-pollution exemptions with them, that in the last few years the  quality of local air has actually declined.  This decline is not because it is impossible to build a clean-running  engine that delivers enough power for a large vehicle. The big  engines of some modern full-size cars, such as certain Cadillacs, run  with hardly any smog emissions. The 240-horsepower V-6 engine of my  family's Honda Odyssey minivan, built in Alabama, generates enough  power to move an SUV, but it emits barely measurable pollutants, less  than 10 percent of the amount allowed by the standard for regular  cars, which is already quite strict. SUV and light pickup engines  that could meet anti-pollution rules would be wholly practical. It is  just that they are not required, so Detroit does not build them; and  Congress, which is in Detroit's pocket, keeps putting off the day  when the requirement will kick in.  To strengthen its argument that the first SUV versions of Jeeps were  really trucks--even though the company was loading them with luxury  features for marketing as personal cars--American Motors pointed to  the Jeep's truck-like undercarriage and to its purported ability to  operate off-road. Eventually a federal bureaucrat decreed that an SUV  with air conditioning, leather seats, and other suburban amenities  becomes a truck if it is "capable of off-highway operation." The test  of this, in turn, became whether the vehicle is tall enough to  provide ground clearance. So Detroit made the early SUVs very tall,  to be assured of the pollution-control exemption. Height makes SUVs  hostile-looking, causes their headlights to dazzle oncoming drivers,  makes them block other drivers' view of the road, and renders them  more likely to roll over. But it assures the exemption, which was all  that mattered.  In the 1970s, as the rules of the Clean Air Act took force, federal  mileage standards also went into effect. An asterisk in the rules  specified that they did not apply to vehicles in excess of 6,000  pounds gross weight (vehicle weight plus maximum load). This asterisk  was intended to keep the miles-per-gallon (MPG) rules for regular  cars from affecting real trucks, since at the time there were no  ordinary vehicles with a gross weight in excess of 6,000 pounds. But  early SUV manufacturers realized that if they beefed up the  suspensions of their products to reach the 6,000-pound mark, they  could evade mileage restrictions. So Detroit deliberately made SUVs  heavier and more wasteful. The rules, you see, had been set up to  reward waste.  By the 1990s, a federal "fleet" standard (the average of all new  models sold by a manufacturer) of 20.7 miles per gallon would be  established for SUVs, versus the federal standard of 27.5 miles per  gallon for regular cars. But though cars as a group actually meet the  federal mileage requirement, the SUV standard remains shot through  with loopholes. Manufacturers get exemptions if they declare SUVs  "dual fuel," or capable of running on ethanol. Millions of SUVs and  pickups are now "dual fuel" for rule-evasion purposes, though almost  none actually run on ethanol. (In most states, gas stations do not  even sell ethanol.) Federal MPG ratings are also derived from  unrealistic tests in which SUVs are daintily accelerated with air  conditioners off and never, ever driven above the speed limit--since  speeding, as we know, is illegal.  Officially, the Dodge Durango gets 13 miles per gallon in city  driving and scores just 1 on the 1-to-10 EPA scale of clean-air  performance. The Chevy Avalanche gets 13 miles per gallon in the city  and scores 0 on a scale of 10. The Cadillac Escalade gets 12 miles  per gallon and hits 0 on a scale of 10. The Chevy Tahoe--owned by  Leonardo DiCaprio, who demands that everyone else sacrifice to  prevent an artificial greenhouse effect--gets 14 miles per gallon and  0 on a scale of 10 for environmental responsibility. And in actual  use drivers will be lucky to realize even these pathetically low  figures.  Low mileage in SUVs and pickups is not dictated by the laws of nature  any more than pollution-spewing is. Automotive engineers, including  those in Detroit, have accomplished wonders with MPG improvement.  Full-sized cars such as the Ford Crown Victoria and Chevy Impala now  do well on an MPG basis. The new Impala records 32 MPG on the  highway, a number that Toyota and Datsun buyers would have envied in  the 1970s. The large Buick Park Avenue gets 20 miles per gallon in  the city and earns a 7 on the environmental scale of 10. Detroit  knows perfectly well how to build fuel-efficient, low-polluting large  vehicles.  Large cars now do well on fuel efficiency because the MPG rules for  regular cars are actually enforced, compelling Detroit to comply. But  Congress has repeatedly granted special waivers for SUVs: in 1990, in  a showdown during which a Senate filibuster was used to block  progress, and again in 2002, when a bill to improve SUV and pickup  mileage drew only 38 votes in the Senate. (Even many Democrats voted  nay.) Just before Christmas, President George W. Bush announced that  SUV and light pickup fuel-efficiency standards would rise about 10  percent, to an official fleet average of 22.2 MPG, by the model year  2007. Ten percent improvement is preferable to inaction, but it is  far less than the SUV fuel efficiency gains that the National  Research Council recently told the White House would be practical  using current technology. Also, the administration's decision leaves  the "dual fuel" gimmick in place, meaning that many SUVs and pickups  will simply evade the new standard.  Why such resistance to improving fuel efficiency for SUVs? Since SUVs  and light pickups are now Detroit's most profitable products--owing  to their popularity, they command price premiums and sell at  considerable mark-ups--an unholy alliance of conservatives who oppose  federal energy-efficiency rules and Democrats from United Automobile  Workers (UAW) states consistently blocks legislative attempts to do  nothing more radical than require SUVs and pickups to meet the same  standards as regular cars. Detroit does need profit; and, as Bradsher  writes, SUV revenues "have contributed to the economic revival of the  upper Midwest." But SUVs would still be profitable if they were  fuel-efficient, clean, and safe: and all three of those qualities are  technologically attainable. The only vehicle type that would be put  out of existence by meaningfully higher mileage standards would be  the ultra-offensive Excursion, Tahoe, and Hummer class of leviathan  SUVs, the existence of which represents a classic "public nuisance"  in legal terms anyway.  Freed from meaningful mileage regulation, designers of SUVs and  pickups have concentrated all engine-technology advances on power and  acceleration. The result is enormous SUVs that go from 0 to 60 miles  per hour in 8.5 seconds, which is the rate at which sleek sports cars  accelerated a generation ago. (Despite cultural nostalgia for the  muscle cars of the 1960s, all categories of automobile are now faster  than they used to be: average acceleration has increased about 10  percent per decade since 1970, and the added speed is one reason that  roads grow ever more hectic.) SUV drivers certainly do not need  excessive acceleration, except to act anti-socially. Indeed,  excessive acceleration imperils them, because SUVs and pickups are  hard to control with the pedal against the floorboard, and when  accelerating they are prone to spinning out as a consequence of too  much steering input. Porsche is about to begin selling a  450-horsepower SUV that goes from 0 to 60 in 5.6 seconds, which is  racetrack speed. Between this absurd degree of ultrahostile  acceleration and the poor handling and compromised safety inherent to  the SUV, Porsche's product is a death sentence for the company's  customers. We can soon expect a reduction in the sort of people who  buy a Porsche SUV.  Through the 1970s and early 1980s, nascent SUVs won special exemption  after special exemption. Regulators ruled that SUV bumpers did not  have to be as effective as bumpers on regular cars. Impact standards  for driver survival and passenger survival initially were waived,  though they have since been enforced. SUVs and pickups were permitted  to have much poorer brakes than cars--meaning longer stopping  distances--and less durable tires. Designers were not required to  lower the height of the headlights on SUVs so that they did not blind  oncoming drivers: automakers complained that lowered headlights  prevented these vehicles from looking menacing, and regulators caved.  SUV manufacturers were given permission to use darkened passenger  windows, which are forbidden on regular cars. There is no logic here  that I can detect, other than that darkened passenger windows look  cinematically ominous and SUV merchants want a monopoly on that look.  (Darkened windows do reduce the load on air conditioners, but if that  is good, why can't regular cars have them?) And SUVs were exempted  from stability rules that might have prevented rollovers. Rather than  making SUVs stable, manufacturers were required only to place a  sticker on the sun visor warning of the vehicle's instability.  Perhaps most important from the marketing standpoint, during a trade  war with Japan in the late 1970s SUVs won a special import tariff of  25 percent against their competition. This occurred back when Japan  was cleaning Detroit's clock and the UAW was worried. In 1980, as Ted  Kennedy campaigned to take the Democratic presidential nomination  away from Jimmy Carter, Douglas Fraser, the head of the UAW, played  the two off each other to win a 25 percent tariff on imported SUVs  and most imported pickups. The tariff on pickups exists to this day,  grandfathered into World Trade Organization agreements, while the SUV  tariff lasted until two years ago, when it was removed after Detroit  achieved market dominance in this category.  The many exemptions, coupled with import protection, made SUVs and  light pickups categories that Detroit became extremely eager to  promote. During the 1970s and early 1980s, the one period when small  cars were most popular with buyers, manufacturers offered SUVs as a  way to stand out in the crowd. The Chevrolet Blazer hit the market in  1982, followed by the Ford Bronco in 1983. Shortly afterward the OPEC  price-maintenance system collapsed and the cost of gasoline declined.  Older people started buying SUVs because they found that the  vehicle's height made it easier to get in and out. People who wanted  to be different or obstreperous or macho behind the wheel flocked to  SUVs. People who once bought station wagons switched to SUVs as  manufacturers phased out the wagon, which had no import protection,  in favor of the "sport-ute."  Here and there SUVs actually were used by outdoorsy types seeking  adventure. But, as Bradsher reports, the leading customers for  SUVs--to the surprise of auto marketers--were affluent suburbanites  who had no intention of driving anywhere other than freeways and mall  parking lots. SUVs sold better in cities than in the countryside.  They sold well in New York City, Boston, and Los Angeles. "By the end  of the 1990s," Bradsher writes, "SUVs accounted for a quarter of all  new vehicle registrations in Manhattan, compared with a little under  17 percent nationwide." Clearly not envisioning weekends of  backcountry camping, buyers began loading up SUVs with every possible  creature comfort, so much so that factories essentially stopped  producing the basic versions you would expect to encounter on rugged  trails. And so Americans fell in love with SUVs, pretending that the  only reason for this infatuation was their erroneous belief that  riding in an SUV keeps you safe.     III.  For the purposes of securing regulatory advantage, the manufacturers  of SUVs falsely claim that their products are trucks, but there is  one sense in which they really are trucks: most SUVs have been built  on truck underbodies. Early models such as the Bronco and the Blazer  had tall passenger compartments bolted to pickup truck frames.  Bolting SUV bodies onto truck frames saved Detroit research and  development money, and stiff, heavy truck frames are indeed what you  would want if you were actually taking your SUV off-road. But since  almost all buyers use SUVs the way they would use a car--only 1  percent of SUVs are ever driven offroad, Bradsher notes--the truck  undercarriage was the beginning of a safety nightmare.  Vehicles on truck frames do not handle well, owing to details of  suspension and frame properties. Experienced truck drivers know this,  and generally they drive their trucks conservatively. But SUVs and  light pickups are marketed to suburbanites who drive them like cars,  careening around corners. When driven in this manner, truck-based  SUVs and pickups are prone to flip over. Moreover, truck-frame  construction deprives a vehicle's occupants of protection. Almost all  regular cars now have a "unibody" design, in which the driver and the  passengers sit protected by a single-unit metal enclosure that bends  but does not break, except in the worst crashes. The body-on-frame  construction used in SUVs, by contrast, bends poorly; when something  slams into an SUV, the body and the frame may separate, exposing the  vehicle's occupants. This is the primary reason that SUVs and pickups  can be enormous and surround you with hard, heavy alloy, yet are not  necessarily any safer. In federal crashworthiness tests, SUVs and  pickups have consistently done worse than regular cars. The 1997  Chevy Blazer, General Motors Jimmy, and Oldsmobile Bravada all earned  one star in such tests, which means that they are death traps;  regular cars rarely get less than three stars. (Air bags have since  improved most SUVs' crash ratings; and the first SUV with a car-like  undercarriage, the new version of the Ford Explorer, recently did  well in crash testing.)  Insurance-company data, Bradsher writes, show that SUVs and light  pickups have much higher loss rates than regular cars. That SUV  owners generally do not pay higher insurance premiums is a perverse  consequence of 1970s-era laws that discouraged insurers from linking  auto premiums to vehicle weights. Those laws were enacted when the  well-off had glistening new small cars and the poor had old land  yachts; in the era of the SUV, they represent a subsidy from the poor  to the well-off. Buyers of luxury SUVs may also get tax breaks denied  to buyers of regular cars. As the Detroit News recently reported, the  Internal Revenue Service has been allowing affluent business owners  who buy SUVs and classify them as business "trucks"--even if they are  actually burlwood-trimmed Cadillacs for personal use--to knock as  much as $25,000 off their taxes through a special depreciation. The  special tax break only applies if the SUV weighs more than 6,000  pounds, which represents still another reward for waste.  The most recent comprehensive study of SUV performance and safety,  published last July by the National Research Council (NRC), an  affiliate of the National Academy of Sciences, found that occupant  deaths were slightly higher in SUVs as a class than in cars as a  class. That's right: in an accident, you and your family are more  likely to die if you are riding in an SUV rather than in a car.  During last year's Senate debate on blocking SUV mileage standards,  Senator Barbara Mikulski of Maryland--a state with SUV component  plants--declared that "women love their SUVs ... because of their  safety." This is political feminism degraded into a sales pitch for  bad cars. There is no gainsaying that women, and others, feel secure  in SUVs, but the important fact is that this feeling of security is  an illusion.  The NRC study found that large cars such as the Buick Riviera and  mid-size models such as the Toyota Camry are notably safer for the  people inside them than are SUVs. The study also found that the most  dangerous vehicles for their occupants are compact and sub-compact  cars ("econo-boxes" such as the Dodge Neon and other small vehicles)  and, at the other end of the scale, pickups. In this sense, the study  confirmed the popular belief that econo-boxes are death traps. And so  they are: do not buy them and do not let your children ride in them.  The study also confirmed the popular belief that large cars are safer  than compacts. But safety design, not tonnage, is the significant  factor. SUVs weigh far more than full-size and mid-size cars, but the  latter are safer for occupants because they are designed in  accordance with the strictest safety standards, while SUVs and  pickups are not. Minivans are large, but do well on safety ratings:  their buyers tend to be safety-conscious because the vehicles are  intended to haul children, and so automakers, even in Detroit, have  applied to minivans the safety-design emphasis missing from SUVs and  pickups.  The NRC's findings have been relentlessly misrepresented by Detroit's  lobbyists and by the White House, which seeks to justify inaction on  SUV fuel waste at the same time that it may ask American soldiers to  die in Iraq in part for the politics of oil. Lobbyists and  administration officials have repeatedly stated that the NRC study  concluded that if the MPG rules for SUVs were made stricter, 2,000  people would die from weight reduction in future SUV designs. Yet the  NRC asserted no inescapable relationship between weight and occupant  safety. (Pickup trucks, among the heaviest of vehicles, are also  among the most dangerous to drive or to ride in.) What the NRC study  really says is that imposition of the original federal fuel-economy  rules caused 2,000 avoidable deaths between 1976 and 1993 because the  rules led to people buying econo-boxes; and the early econo-boxes had  almost no safety engineering. Today advanced safety design allows  hefty cars such as the Impala to get excellent mileage per gallon,  meaning MPG rules no longer force buyers into econo-boxes, which I  would be happy to see taken off the market on safety grounds.  The NRC report is poorly written, and its density seems intended to  defy clear understanding. Yet the 2,000-deaths figure applies to the  past, not to the future, and its constant misuse by lobbyists and  White House officials falls somewhere between misunderstanding and  propaganda. What did the NRC actually conclude about the safety  implications of future mileage improvements? That mileage increases  "could produce additional road casualties," but only under federal  rules "as currently structured" (and every specialist advocates  better rules), while there would likely be no additional casualties  if stricter standards were "specifically targeted at the largest,  heaviest" SUVs and pickups, which is exactly what reformers propose.  While SUVs and pickups do not keep their occupants any safer, they  cause significant and avoidable peril to others on the road. No  regulations govern the effect that vehicles have when they hit other  vehicles; the rules apply only to people on the inside. In accidents,  SUVs and pickups are Charon on wheels. Their weight imparts more  energy to the crash. A frame that breaks free of an SUV during an  accident becomes an iron guillotine aimed at the other car's  passenger compartment. In a front-to-front crash, the high noses of  SUVs and pickups tend to ride up over the sloping engine compartments  of regular cars, resulting in the SUV sitting atop the car and  crushing its occupants. (Some new SUVs incorporate a bar designed to  reduce the odds of riding up and crushing. High and Mighty doesn't  mention this, but Detroit engineers call it the Bradsher Bar, owing  to Bradsher's relentless New York Times reporting on this particular  risk.)  Bradsher's terrific book provides incredible and ominous detail on  the risks that SUVs and pickups pose to other drivers, and the extent  to which automakers knew the dangers and covered them up. He cites  "the best estimates of federal regulators" that the height, the  weight, and the design of SUVs and pickups is causing an avoidable  2,000 deaths per year (yes, another 2,000 estimate) in cars struck by  the Godzilla machines. Highway deaths declined through the 1980s and  early 1990s, even as more people drove greater distances; the decline  flattened out in the late 1990s, though advanced safety features such  as anti-lock brakes, "crumple zones," and air bags were becoming  common, while programs to encourage shoulder-harness use and to  discourage drunk driving were notably successful nationwide. Why did  the reduction in auto deaths stop while new safety devices came into  use and drunk driving declined? The "kill rate" caused by the  presence of ever more SUVs on the road was swamping all safety gains.  Bradsher cites an engineering study: "When a car strikes another car  in the side, the driver of the struck car is 6.6 times as likely to  die as the driver of the striking car. But when an SUV hits a car in  the side, the death ratio rises to 30 to 1." Bradsher adds that the  "kill rate" for pickups is worst of all, "because pickups are more  likely to be driven by reckless young men, and because the bulk of  pickups on the road are full-sized models while the bulk of SUVs on  the road are still midsized."  A cynic would say that SUV drivers do not care if they kill others in  crashes, so long as they survive themselves; and surely some SUV  buyers believe that they are making themselves safer and do not give  a hoot if someone else suffers. This viewpoint is very prevalent.  Bradsher cites an SUV marketing specialist explaining that part of  the sell line is, "If there is a crash, I want the other guy to die."  During last winter's Senate decision not to impose any new mileage  standards on SUVs, Senator Kit Bond of Missouri, whose state is home  to an SUV assembly plant, declared that "government should not  interfere with the people's right" to choose SUVs and enormous  pickups. But since when is there a "right" to imperil others? This is  not like a First Amendment situation regarding what you read or think  or how you worship, or like a Fourth Amendment situation regarding  what you do within the walls of your home. Driving an SUV or a light  pickup is a public act that creates avoidable public risk. Suppose I  invented a device--say, a security system with an automated arrow  launcher--that would make homes slightly safer, with the regrettable  side effect that it would occasionally malfunction and kill a  passerby. Would Senator Bond say that his next-door neighbors had a  "right" to install my invention and point it in his direction? The  Founding Fathers would shiver to hear politicians assert a right to  cause harm or to act irresponsibly in the public sphere.  Since SUVs actually imperil their own passengers, cynical buyers who  believe that they are adding to their own safety by subtracting from  the safety of others are not getting their money's worth. Indeed,  considering that most SUVs are expensive, buyers rarely get their  money's worth at all. Buyers surely assume, for example, that if SUVs  have leather seats and eleven-speaker Bose audio systems, then they  must also have good brakes. Actually most SUVs have inferior brake  systems with longer stopping distances than regular cars, while many  lack "independent suspension," a standard car feature that improves  handling. You have read that SUVs are cash cows for automakers,  bringing in much higher profits than most regularcar products. Why  are SUVs so profitable? Because they sell at premium prices while  being in many respects shoddy merchandise.  A false sense of safety once came to buyers of Ford Explorers with  Firestone tires. The notoriously lethal crashes of these vehicles,  which led to the biggest recall in auto history and to huge monetary  losses for Ford and BridgestoneFirestone, were ultimately traced to  defects in the tires, as Explorers with Goodyear tires experienced no  unusual problems. (No unusual problems in this sense means that  Explorers with Goodyear tires were extra-dangerous in the standard  way: "SUV occupants have long had nearly double the death rate of car  occupants in tire-related crashes," Bradsher writes.) And drivers  contributed to the problem. Many Explorer-Firestone crashes occurred  when drivers were speeding (often driving far above the speed limit)  and had overloaded vehicles.  Bradsher's book amply documents what you might expect: the dogged  attempts by Ford and Firestone to deny the threat. High and Mighty  offers a funny-if-it-weren't-sad account of how tire-loading  contributed to the Explorer-Firestone problem. One of the many  practical jokes about SUVs is that as big and imposing as they  appear, they cannot carry much more than regular cars. The maximum  safe load for the pre-2002 Explorer was 1,300 pounds, the same limit  as for the mid-size Ford Taurus. (It is astonishing how engineers  have managed to throw metal at the SUV and yet have come up with  vehicles offering few advantages in usable size. The insides of many  SUVs are actually cramped! Try to wedge yourself into the backseat of  the cost-no-object four-door Range Rover SUV and you will long for a  regular car.) In this golden age of American obesity, four passengers  alone can come perilously close to the 1,300-pound maximum safe load.  Add lots of stuff and your SUV is over its rated weight, which adds  to the risk of tire failure and loss of control.  Most drivers do not even know that there is a safe-load limit that  they are not supposed to exceed. To prevent buyers from realizing how  readily the Explorer could be packed over its safe weight, Bradsher  writes, Ford did not list the safe load anywhere on the vehicle or  even in the owner's manual. Instead the maximum gross weight--vehicle  and load combined--was stamped inside the doorjamb. This number is  completely useless unless you know what the SUV itself weighs.  Preposterously, owner's manuals instructed buyers that they were to  find some way to weigh the vehicle, then subtract that number from  the gross weight to determine safe load. Bradsher spent a day in an  Explorer driving around trying to find a truck scale that would weigh  his ride; he is surely the only person ever to have done this. The  extent to which Ford tried to camouflage this basic safety number was  stunning. In the aftermath of the Firestone tire debacle, the company  now prominently labels SUVs for safe load, but it remains true that  most SUV buyers have no idea that safe-load limits even exist.  The notion that four-wheel-drive systems make SUVs safer than regular  cars is yet another fallacy. Front-wheel-drive systems are clearly  superior to rear-wheel drive for traction, because front-wheel drive  places the drive wheels under the vehicle's primary weight, the  engine, which is good for stickiness. All that four-wheel drive does  is to add rear-wheel power to a front-wheel-drive setup--but it is  the rear wheels that are likely to spin in the first place. In  off-road use, four-wheel drive is important because there may be  times when only one side of the vehicle touches the surface, or when  one side is on a hard surface while the other is on a soft surface.  In highway driving conditions, four-wheel drive offers no advantages  over front-wheel drive. (And in all conditions, four-wheel drive does  not increase braking power; all vehicles already have brakes on all  four wheels.) Indeed, a front-wheel-drive car with "traction  control," which regulates wheel spinout, is likely to hold the road  in bad weather better than a four-wheel-drive SUV.  So what does four-wheel drive add to SUVs? In regular use, nothing  but weight, cost, and lowered fuel economy. It also creates an  artificial sense of protection that may cause SUV owners to drive  like maniacs and find out the hard way about four-wheel drive. Last  winter my wife and I had to drive across the Cumberland Pass, near  the Maryland-West Virginia border, in a snowstorm. The transit was  hard and required close attention, but the car, a front-wheel-drive  Honda Accord built in Ohio, never skidded. We passed perhaps two  dozen vehicles spun out on the shoulders along the expanse of the  pass, owners standing nearby swearing and gesturing as they shouted  into cell phones. Every one of the spun-out vehicles was an SUV.  Which brings us to the rollover. The primary reason SUVs are more  dangerous to ride in than cars is that they are far more likely to  tumble in this way. "Roughly 1,000 Americans died needlessly in  rollovers in 2000 because they were in SUVs instead of cars,"  Bradsher writes, summing up a large body of research. Needless  SUV-rollover deaths are likely to increase, owing to the growing use  of SUVs. Buyers who choose enormous SUVs because the metal makes them  feel safe are surely thinking that most car crashes are head-to-head  collisions, in which metal does favor those in SUVs. Such buyers  probably dismiss the chance of a rollover as an extreme rarity. Yet  fully one-third of highway deaths occur in rollovers. If this were  more widely known, surely people would not be lining up to purchase  vehicles that are likely to roll over.  SUVs roll over because their center of gravity is much higher than  that of regular cars; and because their tires are often overloaded;  and because truck-like steering properties make them harder to  control than cars for average drivers who lack truck licenses; and  because every time a passenger climbs into an SUV, his or her own  body weight, sitting tall off the road, raises the center of gravity  that much higher. Since the weight of passengers and luggage raises  the SUV's center of gravity, a vehicle that is packed with people is  more likely to roll over than a vehicle containing only a driver,  making everything still worse. There is even an awful SUV-guardrail  interaction. Most guardrails have a standard height that stops cars  well but just happens to be perfect for making runaway SUVs flip over  and crush their occupants. Half of SUV buyers are now women, and they  tell focus groups that they are attracted to the feeling of sitting  high off the road. No one informs them that sitting high off the road  makes them more likely to die.  Bradsher's book presents a depressing chronicle of how automakers  strove to suppress information about SUV rollover deaths and how  eagerly Congress cooperated in the hush-up. Since the dawn of the  SUV, members of Congress, prominently including John Dingell of  Michigan, have pressed the National Highway Traffic Safety  Administration (NHTSA) not to test SUVs for rollover likelihood.  Another prominent water-carrier for the SUV is Representative Martin  Frost of Texas, Nancy Pelosi's recent rival for the position of House  minority leader; Frost once favored higher mileage standards for  SUVs, but instantly became an apologist when General Motors converted  a factory in his district to SUV production. Only after the  Explorer-Firestone scandal did Congress instruct NHTSA to investigate  SUV rollovers. Since the scandal, NHTSA has published a largely  meaningless rollover rating calculated solely from a vehicle's  wheelbase and height. Beginning this year, NHTSA will perform actual  tests to determine which SUVs roll over and which are stable. Members  of Congress from SUV-producing states opposed the actual-conditions  tests, apparently worried that voters would find out what the real  risks are.  High and Mighty makes still another unsettling point about the safety  of SUVs. So far SUVs have been only somewhat more dangerous than  cars, Bradsher writes, because they are expensive and tend to be  purchased by well-off people between 30 and 50 years old, a cohort  with a below-average incident of causing crashes. Soon, as the first  generation of monster SUVs gets traded in, these behemoths will begin  entering the used-car market, where they will be purchased by  immigrants, the lower middle class, and the poor, who generally  speed, run lights, drive drunk, and crash more often than the  prosperous classes. It is sad but true that the less well-off, and  especially immigrants, drive more recklessly than the well-off; and  the fines, the points, the raised insurance rates, the revoked  licenses, and the greater incidence of crashes are all reasons that  they tend to stay less well-off. At any rate, this segment of the  population is about to be armed with three-ton SUVs and enormous  pickups.  Used SUVs will also end up in the hands of teenage males, who possess  the very worst driving records, regardless of social status. The  "responsible middle-aged people" who bought the first wave of SUVs,  Bradsher notes, mainly had families and did most of their driving in  daylight, when crashes happen less. But the teenagers, the  immigrants, the rowdy young guys, and the others who are about to  inherit the first wave of SUVs drive at night, when accident rates  spike. Today "more than half of the nation's SUVs are less than five  years old," meaning that they are in the hands of their original  owners. Within a few years, the majority of SUVs will be in the hands  of their second or third owners--who, statistics predict, will be  more prone to driving these monsters carelessly.   IV.  "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." This is Bradsher's summary of the auto  industry's own marketing research about SUV buyers, and he adduces  numerous on-the-record comments from auto-marketing gurus to back  this up. One such wise man, named Clotaire Rapaille, tells the Big  Three that people buy SUVs "because they want to look as menacing as  possible." It is perhaps not startling that rather than trying to  alter these buyer proclivities, the manufacturers of SUVs have tried  to encourage them. There are lots of self-centered and self-absorbed  people with little interest in their neighbors. Somebody finally made  a class of vehicles designed to bring out the worst in them.  Many SUVs, such as the Durango, have been consciously engineered to  look as threatening as possible, with auto companies using focus  groups and other techniques documented in High and Mighty to  determine which features and styling cues suggest an anti-social  message and then zeroing in on them. The styling goal for the  oversized Dodge Ram mega-pickup was "a vehicle that would make other  motorists want to get out of your way." Cadillac markets the Escalade  with photography staged to make it appear to be an armored combat  vehicle, over the huge-type sell line Yield.  Bradsher asserts that Rapaille, who will not drive an SUV himself  owing to the danger of rollover, has been an influential force in  encouraging Detroit to make SUVs and light pickups heavier and  nastier-looking, arguing that selfish modern buyers think they can  cut off other drivers more easily in wheels that seem threatening.  Certainly not all large cars are marketed with a hostile message.  Minivans, which though also large are far safer, more fuel efficient,  and lower-polluting than SUVs and pickups, are marketed with an  emphasis on positive values: caring for children, arriving safely,  offering rides to the softball game. SUVs and pickups are sold by  appealing to belligerence, and what you promote is often what you get.  One hostility-intensification feature is the "grill guard" that SUV  manufacturers promote. Grill guards, useful mainly for pushing oryx  out of the road in Namibia, have no application under normal driving  conditions. But they make SUVs look angrier, especially when viewed  through a rearview mirror. (The grotesque new General Motors Hummer  H2 offers a cage of steel in front of the grill for an additional  $525.) Grill guards also increase the chance that an SUV will kill  someone in an accident. As with so many other aspects of the SUV, the  addition of the grill guards is unregulated--though standard cars,  for which there are strict bumper rules, are not supposed to have  metal grill guards.  In addition to marketing hostility, SUV manufacturers assiduously  promote the fiction that the true purpose of the SUV is a romantic  off-road adventure to the far reaches of nowhere. Just as sports-car  manufacturers show their products boldly barreling around the corners  of country roads with no other cars anywhere in sight, SUV ads  feature these vehicles climbing pristine hillsides, perching atop  natural wonders, fording rough and beautiful streams, or racing  through magnificent canyons. There is never anybody or anything in  the scene except the sovereign SUV, which seems to have all of  creation to itself. Often the advertisements are computer-generated  productions in which an SUV is digitally spliced into a natural scene  because the vehicle is not in fact capable of getting to these  farthest reaches of sublimity.  All automakers are guilty of advancing the fiction that SUVs are  intended for offroad adventures, but nothing surpasses in romantic  deception Ford's "No Boundaries" campaign for the company's Explorer,  Expedition, and Excursion SUVs, in which it is suggested that these  vehicles are used primarily to support kayaking, Himalayan ascents,  and Peruvian anthropology. The earth-crushing Excursion weighs four  tons, versus one and a half tons for the typical car. Ford's website  gives the length and height of the Excursion down to tenths of an  inch, but says nothing about its weight.  The marketing of SUVs as if they had something to do with the  outdoors plainly appeals to aging boomers who fancy themselves  adventurous and free-spirited while living tame suburban lives. If  the overwhelming majority of traveling boomers never stray far from  their hotels, millions still wish to maintain the illusion that they  might. Bradsher reports that one of DaimlerChrysler's chief SUV  designers convinced the company that what counted was not how SUVs  were actually used but "the fantasy of what [the buyer] might want to  do during a vacation, and the ability to show friends and other  motorists that they really were the bold people they liked to see  themselves as." That SUVs are becoming popular with young buyers  suggests that the daydream has multi-generational appeal.  The outdoor-adventure illusion of SUVs makes these vehicles worse in  a nefarious way that relates to their treatment in the media. High  and Mighty includes an intriguing discussion on the role of the press  in auto sales. For consumer items such as soft drinks, studies show  that buyers make choices based 90 percent on advertising and  promotion ("paid media," in corporate terms) and just 10 percent on  what newspapers and magazines say ("free media"). When it comes to  cars, by contrast, people tend to read up: studies show that only 20  percent of the buyer's decision is based on promotion, with the rest  coming from what buyers read and hear from the "free media." It is  reassuring to learn that the power of the press still exists  somewhere; but when it comes to SUVs, this power is consistently  misused.  The automotive writers in newspapers and the many "buff books"--Car &  Driver, Road & Track, and the rest--tend to review SUVs by focusing  on their offroad prowess. Auto writers drive these machines up hills,  across boulders, and through deserts, and then analyze the fine  points of four-wheel-drive performance. (Bradsher describes a  hilarious SUV-introduction junket in which writers were given a  succession of washed and polished new Fords to drive like lunatics  through a wilderness area, while they were followed everywhere by  chefs, wine stewards, and a huge trailer that contained marble  bathrooms for the Ford executives.) This form of rating is wildly  irrelevant to the actual uses of these vehicles. But in order to be  assured of good off-road ratings, General Motors, DaimlerChrysler,  and Ford beef up the suspensions, the frame rails, and the horsepower  of their SUV models, rendering them more wasteful and more dangerous  in the conditions under which they are actually used.  Auto writers and buff books rarely discuss SUV safety or gas mileage,  not wanting to upset advertising buyers or alter their own  obsequious, handout-based relationship with Detroit. The Washington  Post recently offered an instance beyond parody. Its auto writer,  Warren Brown, penned a love poem to the new General Motors Hummer H2,  the most offensive SUV yet devised. Skipping the fact that the Hummer  is a leather-lined luxury toy (heated seats, nine Bose speakers)  being marketed to affluent suburbanites, Brown deliriously proclaimed  that the Hummer is what Jesus would drive. Its size and its  profligacy are justified, Brown said, because "if you are a  missionary like some of my friends," you could use a Hummer "to bring  loads of food and medical supplies" to the poor. But verily I tell  you that no car on the road will allow its driver to pass through the  eye of a needle less easily than a Hummer.  The SUV's combination of sociopathy and fantasy has reached its  preposterous culmination in this vehicle, which is based on the  military Humvee, originally designed to carry infantry and machine  guns. The Hummer gets ten miles per gallon, meaning that its annual  greenhouse-gas emissions triple those of a car, and it weighs nearly  three tons. (Still another loophole: if an SUV grows heavy enough,  like the Hummer, the manufacturer does not have to report its fuel  mileage to the EPA.) Hummers are even longer and higher than standard  large SUVs, but Consumer Guide recently warned of the vehicle's  "limited cargo room" and "cramped" seats, evidence of poor design.  (The mid-size Nissan Maxima, which weighs less than half as much as a  Hummer, has more front legroom.) The Hummer cannot park without  straddling spaces. Its owner would be out of his or her mind to take  this $52,000 bauble off the interstate, though of course the  advertising features the usual postcard scenes of the noble outdoors.  (In my favorite, a Hummer is racing across a glacier.) Do I need to  tell you that Arnold Schwarzenegger persuaded General Motors to offer  the civilian Hummer, endorsed it, and purchased the first one? The  Hummer screams to the world the words that stand as one of  Schwarzenegger's signature achievements as an actor: "Fuck you,  asshole!" Maybe this class of vehicles should be called FUVs.    V.  What does it say about the United States that there are now millions  of people who want to drive an anti-social automobile? Huge numbers  of Americans will pay thousands of dollars extra for vehicles that  visually declare, "I have serious psychological problems." (Though  maybe we are better off having this declared.) The antagonistic  environment of the modern road is linked, of course, to the more  general psychological predicament usually called stress. We are all  stressed for time or money or achievement or sex, or at least we all  view ourselves as being thus stressed; and the road is experienced as  both an obstacle to the things that we are in such a hurry to fail to  get and an arena for the cathartic release from this strain.  The road also has the advantage of anonymity. Screaming "Fuck you,  asshole!" to a neighbor or a colleague might have costs. Screaming it  behind dark glass in the fast lane, or symbolically as we roar up  behind others or cut them off, is probably not therapeutically  useful--my pop-psychology guess is that road rage makes the rager  feel worse. But the ethos of the modern road, especially the ever  greater number of SUVs and pickups that are intended by their  designers to instill hostility, seems to encourage maniacal driving  and the pointless taking of offense at the slightest lack of  deference on the part of other drivers. On America's highways, calm  people are scorned as losers.  The nation's self-sabotaging unofficial moratorium on road-building  further contributes to this culture of anger. In the last thirty  years, vehicle-miles driven on U.S. roads have increased by 143  percent, while road miles have risen by a mere five percent. The  number of miles we drive is a link to our greater prosperity: there  are now nearly as many cars in the United States as there are  licensed drivers, and almost everyone wants to drive alone, which we  all find unreasonable on the part of the other guy but divinely  convenient for ourselves.  Some of the miles-driven figure is owed to the combination of  government policy and union intransigence that ruined the railroads  as freight carriers, leading to the truck deregulation that spawned  the tens of thousands of "sweatshops of wheels" that now obstruct  highways. Next time you are wedged between two tractor-trailers  speeding downhill in the rain, bear in mind that most of what they  carry used to move on the now-idle rail lines, while highways were  kept free for cars and buses. Truck deregulation (slightly) holds  down consumer prices by (slightly) cutting costs for retailers, but  it chokes traffic and it makes highway travel unpleasant; a sensible  union compromise to keep goods, and jobs, along the rails would have  made far more sense for society as a whole. And if you don't like the  weaving, speeding way that many big rigs are driven today, bear in  mind that the Bush administration has proposed that the minimum age  for a truck license be lowered to eighteen, in order to create even  more downward pressure on drivers' wages.  Rising immigration is another factor in declining road civility.  Today the United States admits more legal immigrants annually than  all other nations in the world combined, and its percentage of  foreign-born citizens is the highest it has been since the 1920s.  Mainly this is a social good; but if you have ever driven in poor  nations, you know that American roads are models of civic decorum  compared with much of the rest of the world. In developing nations,  traffic moves willy-nilly, while people ignore lights and veer  blithely into congested roads. Some immigrants bring such habits  here, and since state authorities have in effect decided that a  driver's license should go to everyone over sixteen regardless of  skill--licenses are now handed out for barely minimal displays of  competency--an international bad-driver virus is loose on America's  roads.  Consider the changing sociology of the flashing of high beams.  Traditionally in the United States, a quick flash of high beams has  meant, "You go first." In much of the world--especially in India and  Pakistan, the cradle of a large fraction of recent  immigrants--flashed high beams mean, "I should rather that I and all  my family died a gruesome, meaningless death than yield to you."  People in India and Pakistan flash their high beams as a warning that  they are about to run a light or are coming the wrong way down a  one-lane road. Ten years ago in the Washington area, when you flashed  your high beams at someone waiting to make a left turn, the person  would make the turn and give you a grateful wave. Now when you do  this the other driver does not budge, assuming the flash means that  you are accelerating for the purpose of cutting him off.  In some infuriating way, moreover, the SUV and the cellular phone are  evil twins. Their proliferation has occurred in tandem, and the  conjunction of cell phone use and road rage cannot be overlooked. The  man or woman barreling down the road in an SUV while yakking into a  cell phone is broadcasting the public-service message "Get out of my  way, because I am paying no attention to what I am doing." Safety  advances such as air bags and anti-lock brakes have moderately  backfired in this regard, as they engender a false sense of security,  making the cell phone-SUV crowd think it can barrel distractedly down  the road without risk.  The driving metaphor has long been central to American culture. It  always entailed a spiritual aspect: the hunger for autonomy, the need  for solitude, the urge for power, the problem of never finding what  you are looking for. But in the era of the SUV, the driving metaphor  has turned simply nasty, a twisting of freedom into aggression and  the unfettered satisfaction of a technologically abetted narcissism.  This has terrible consequences. There is the waste of petroleum,  which causes us to import too much oil from the Persian Gulf and to  remain dependent on the despots in Iraq and Saudi Arabia. There are  runaway greenhouse gases, which may or may not cause harm but surely  cannot be good. There is the transformation of commuting and  chore-running into a big nerve-wracking unpleasantness, while  spoiling the fun of driving. And there are the needless deaths of our  fellow citizens.  That last result of the SUV craze is what should haunt us the most.  But where is the general media attention to High and Mighty, which  ends with reasonable prescriptions for reform? Only auto writers and  the "buff" press are paying heed, and only to attack Bradsher's  disclosures for jeopardizing their sweetheart relationship with  Detroit. Members of Congress, for their part, have so far responded  to this extraordinary book as they have responded to the entire  issue: by hiding under their desks.  On New Year's Day, the incoming Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist was  praised for racing to give emergency aid to victims of a vehicle  wreck in Florida. Two children died despite his efforts. What was  largely overlooked in the coverage of Frist's heroism was the  character of the crash. A tire blew on an SUV and the monstrosity  flipped, ending two young lives; tire-caused fatalities are rare  among regular cars. Will Frist become an advocate of SUV reform, or  will he return to Washington and join his colleagues in the next  round of cover-ups and exemptions? Frist has now seen with his own  eyes the folly of government's coddling of the SUV: the harm done by  leading Americans to believe that these vehicles will protect people.  In fact, the doctor-senator has now had their blood on his hands.   Gregg Easterbrook is a senior editor at TNR.