I don’t think anyone here will contest that a lot of SUV drivers are incapable of understanding the basic concepts of courtesy.
I grew up driving trucks. From day one, I understood that a truck is bigger than a car, handles differently, rides differently. Different driving rules apply. You have to think about stopping quicker, be more alert, be more careful, make a point of being extra courteous. This is true of my Explorer and even more so of my 1967 Land Rover 109.
The gap in performance between a full size pickup and a Porsche 911 has narrowed, but it’s still there, nobody will ever mistake one for another.
In the past seven or eight years, I have noticed that a large number of people have jumped onto the SUV bandwagon, sans the benefit of years of experience driving larger vehicles. In particular, a few people in my neighborhood have traded their sedans in for SUV’s. Knowing these people, and watching how they drove before, and seeing how they drive now, I have developed an interesting theory:
SUV’s are amplifiers for horrible personality traits.
Case in point: Woman across the street. Well known in the neighborhood to be a prick of biblical proportions. As long as she was driving her K car, she wasn’t bad to be around. She wasn’t Ms Courteous driver, but it was possible, at least, to share the roads in the neighborhood with her.
Now that she has her Escalade, she drives over my lawn,and many other people’s lawns( I suppose that’s her idea of offroading) uses both lanes of a two lane road, won’t yield to oncoming traffic, cuts corners tight enough to put runners and bicyclists in serious danger, has completely stopped making any effort to use her directionals for any purpose, and in fact has mowed down my mailbox and her own, on more than one occasion. Another woman, who has a Volkswagon Beetle, drives like she’s engaging in Death Race 2000 each time she borrows her husband’s Expedition. The three or four changeovers in our neighborhood have gone from being minimally courteous drivers to being hazards to navigation, and I can no longer allow my daughter to ride her bike anywhere but our driveway.
That being said, I have to be pleased at the number of people who have no use for SUV’s, and vocally oppose them. These people, with that attitude, would be nothing short of criminally insane when placed behind the wheel of an SUV. So every time I see someone in an econobox driving like an idiot- which is very, very often- I thank god they hate SUV’s.
I doubt if the rest of us could withstand the danger.
b.
