SUV owners are jerks, sez automakers

Great Debates
21

From -

http://moneycentral.msn.com/articles/insure/basics/6291.asp

More than 10,000 people die each year in rollover accidents, according to the NHTSA. More than 60% of SUV occupants killed in 1999 died in crashes in which their vehicles rolled over. For car occupants, that number was considerably less, at 23%.

Drivers themselves contributed to the problem. NHTSA Administrator **Sue Bailey says that 80% of the people killed in single-vehicle rollovers were not wearing their seatbelts. Occupants wearing seatbelts are 75% less likely to be killed in a rollover crash than occupants who are not wearing seatbelts. ** “Your best chance of surviving a rollover is by buckling up,” Bailey says.

Bolding Mine.

Sure, anyone that understands the most basic physics will know that a vehicle with a higher center of gravity will be more at risk to roll. If you don’t drive like a maniac, it shouldn’t be a problem. It’s important to keep track of who is wearing seatbelts, but I think a study that would make more sense would be of belted drivers/passengers only. It is a piece of safety equipment. If you ignore it, it’s not the vehicles fault.

22

Enipla - thank you for the link and the figures on the seatbelts. I think it reinforces my position that the danger is with unsafe drivers, not the SUV itself.

4 out of 5 people killed in rollovers were not wearing their seat belt. Not wearing a seat belt probably indicates a lack of regard for personal safety and may be a decent proxy to estimate a person’s unsafe driving approach and lack of skills, especially driving an SUV.

I didn’t even mention my wearing a seat belt in my earlier posts because it is so automatic to me.

23

I think this “unsafe driver, not unsafe vehicle” argument is not entirely sound.

We know that a proportion of vehicles are going to be involved in accidents, and a proportion of those are going to be involved in accidents through the fault of the driver.

Precisely because we know this, we need to take account of it in vehicle design and licensing. If the SUV does more damage, and kills more people, when it hits another car than other vehicle types we can’t simply shrug and say “Unsafe drivers - whaddayagonnado?” It’s a reasonable question to ask whether the social costs of allowing vehicles of an SUV design outweigh the social benefits.

24

Ok. But just what are social benefits. And how the heck do you regulate them.

For my wife and I owning SUV’s is not a benefit, it’s a need.

Also, I’ve been driving car’s, SUV’s, and 4x4 trucks for 27 years. I have not had so much as a fender bender in a parking lot. As it is, I pay insurance and other people ‘reap’ the rewards. I would hate to see some other tax/regulation because other people are careless.

25

I’ll never forget driving behind that Lincoln Navigator with the vanity plate “TITAN” on it.

26

UDS - earlier this year a dump truck full of gravel going 40-50 mph ran a red light and struck a minivan and killed a high school basketball player riding in the back. The driver of the dump truck was stoned (or possibly drunk but definitely impaired) and was arrested on a vehicular manslaughter and DUI charges if I remember correctly.

Should we outlaw all dump trucks because they are too large and heavy and unsafe or should the driver and the company owner be held responsible because they were operating unsafely? I doubt the family of the kid are going to sue the Mack truck company because their trucks are too big.

I would like to see more restrictions on inexperienced and impaired drivers, but not on the vehicles themselves.

Is there anyone in the auto insurance industry that could weigh in on this discussion? If so, have the actuaries looked at the cost of insuring under 25 drivers in SUVs versus under 25 drivers in regular cars or compared to more experienced drivers?

27

That may be true, but if the market research cited in the article is true (and I’m open to the idea that it’s exaggerated), then it seems that SUVs attract these kinds of drivers.

28

If one looks at accident frequency by type of vehicle, some will have better records than others. It’s noteworthy that only the SUVs are required to “prove themselves.” This is because there has been a big, ongoing campaign against them, for some reason.

If vehicles are to be banned because they’re less safe than average, then we should study all types of vehicles, not just SUVs.

29

All I am concerned with is the higher kill rate in accidents involving SUVs. If the number of deaths is six times as great, I infer that they are simply more dangerous to other, smaller cars that are on the road with them. To rationalize the disproportionate numbers by shifting the blame to young drivers is preposterous.
Even if it is the case in over half of the deaths, there is still a huge difference in overall fatalities.

30

Meeting the needs of people like you and your wife is a social benefit.

H8_2_W8 - suggesting that the social benefits and social costs of SUVs should be examined is not a call to have them outlawed. I haven’t myself conducted this examination so I’m not sure that any action at all is needed but, if it is, the action need not be a ban. For example, other posts in this thread suggest that SUVs may present a particular problem only in the hands of inexperienced drivers, so one could, for instance, consider a regulation requiring a driver to have held an ordinary driving licence for, say, five years before he could hold a licence which would allow him to drive an SUV, or imposing a separate test for an SUV licence, or both. Or if side-impact collisions from an SUV present a special danger, one could require design changes in SUVs to lower the point of impact, or in ordinary saloons to offer better protection against side-impact collisions, or both.

31

Any argument based on SUVs safty record purely revolves around the safety of those inside them. That isn’t good enough. We need to consider those who share the road with them. Otherwise, what’s to stop me designing a car with six-foot retractable spikes all around it? Not my fault if someone else impales themself on them, I find they give me more respect and room on the road and therefore I am safer!

Allocation of fault is also irrelevant. No-one cares how safe a driver you personally are. The fact is that SUVs are going to be involved in crashes and we should be concerned about the lives of everyone involved, whether at fault or not.

The advantages SUVs give their drivers are examples of the driver’s selfishness. That higher up view that allows you to see more of the road? It’s all relative. It’s because you’re higher than everyone else. If everyone else owned hulks like yours you’d find that safety feature suddenly doesn’t work any more. In the mean time your higher viewpoint is blocking everyone else’s view. Anyone like to advocate taking 3 cushions to sit on at the cinema? Think of the advantages your higher viewpoint will give you and who cares about the guy behind you?

And the whole “bigger is safer” argument? Again, all relative. If everything was the same size as your SUV you’d find things not so safe any more. Your safety here is at the expense on anything smaller. Fine if we’re going to run the road with the law of the jungle and survival of the fittest, but you’d hope that safety considerations were more of a civilized, mutual thing.

32

Well, there higher-up because of a number of reasons. All of them related to the U in SUV in one way or another. Same with bigger and heavier. I understand they may be a little harder to see around, but even when I drive a small car, I don’t feel it’s any real problem.

33

It seems to me that SUV’s are most dangerous to “the other guy” in a collision. People purchase vehicles for themselves, not for “the other guy”. As far as I’m concerned, “the other guy” can either pony up and buy an SUV, or shut the hell up.
FTR- I don’t own an SUV. In fact, I think they’re nothing more than hideous, glorified station wagons with parking problems. I will, however, rabidly defend anyone’s right to own and drive whatever they please as long as it fits on the road.

34

So you don’t care if people drive cars that are a menace to other road users?

Do you think any safety standards should be applied to motor vehicles?

35

It’s all a matter of perspective. It could be that the guy in the econo-box is a menace to himself. Either way, poor drivers are a menace to everyone. Poor drivers are less of a menace to the guy in the SUV.

For all I care, a guy could drive an APC, or even a tank as long as it’s small enough to fit properly in its lane and has all of the required signals and safety equipment.

36

Futile: Am I selfish for not wanting to get hurt if someone pulls in front of me or runs a red light and hits me or causes and accident? Yes, I suppose I am, since the size of my vehicle will protect me and my loved ones from bad drivers more than driving a smaller car. And yes, because there are so many pickup trucks, commercial trucks and SUVs on the road, I will be relatively safer in a larger vehicle. Now, as long as I’m not dangerous, then my driving a larger vehicle doesn’t infringe on the safety rights of others in smaller cars.

UDS: I have no problem with some sort of experience/specialized training requirement for people wanting to drive heavier/larger/specialized vehicles. We have that already for large commercial vehicles (semis, dumptrucks) and motorcycles and if there’s a high correlation between accidents/deaths in SUV-involved accidents and inexperienced drivers I think that idea would make sense.

Jehovah: I didn’t see in the OP or in the review anything about SUV “kill rate” being 6 times higher. Do you have the book itself or other sources of info on this point? The review makes mention that in side-impact collisions the hittee is 6 times more likely to die than the hitter (should we assume this only holds for the driver’s side of the hittee car?) in that particular accident between two cars. It also says the ratio between SUVs into cars is 30 to 1 in the same side-impact scenario. I don’t think this means 6 times as many people are killed by SUVs than by cars though in total.

I’m still not sure how the Suburban v. Honda death rates per million factor into this, unless that’s where you’re getting your “6 times” death rate (122/MM v. 21/MM). That’s a 6:1 ratio, but only for two vehicle models on the extremes of the size scale. They show no data at all (in the review at least) on how lives are saved by being in the larger vehicle if someone (in a car) runs into you in a side-impact accident.

Mistakes and accidents happen, but just because someone in a small car makes a mistake and pulls in front of me, why should I have some sort of ethical/moral/civic responsibility to them to also drive a little car that won’t hurt them and may not protect me from their mistake?

Here are the ways side-impact accidents are likely to happen between an SUV (hitter) and a car (hittee): the car pulls out in front of a moving SUV or the car runs a red light and into the path of the SUV. The insurance companies and the courts will place blame on the driver of the car, not the driver of the SUV (or the design of his vehicle). The other scenario would be if the SUV runs through the red light and into the side of an oncoming car, but in this case the fault would be with the driver of the SUV and not the design of the vehicle (just as in the dump truck example from above.)

IMHO, I think there are “jerks” as defined in the OP and review who buy SUVs for image or vanity, but they’re the ones who drive the BMW, Lexus, or Mercedes SUVs and not the other real SUVs (the ones we call trucks). Still though, I doubt if these “jerks” are the dangerous ones.

37

From the OP -

  • 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.”

Bolding mine.

The ‘leading automakers’ conducted this research, and made it public?

Is this the conclusion of the research, or Bradsher’s interpretation?

I would love to see this research. I don’t subscribe to the NY Times, does anyone know what Bradsher’s email is? (I know it’s a long shot)

How in the world do you lump people as ‘Jerks’ and ‘Assholes’ from a market research. It’s got to be his interpretation.

I suspect that if you drive a hybrid and care about your childrens safety, you are a good parent.

But…

If you drive an SUV and care about your childerns safety you are in the group that “generally don’t care about anyone else’s kids but their own”.

38

The special pleading, arguing from anecdote and general level of bullshit coming from those defending SUV’s in this thread is phenomenal. And I say that as someone who drives one.

39

Special pleading? Not sure what you mean by that.

What’s wrong with anecdote’s? I don’t see anything wrong with trying to demonstrate what SUV owners actually use them for.

This thread, and others have shown that you can prove just about anything you want from statistics. As long as you collect your data with loaded questions. And report only the information that supports you’re position.

General level of bullshit? From whom?

I don’t give a hoot what other people drive. I don’t think I should have to defend what I drive.

40

Hey, jerks are critical to the American economy.

Think of the poor workers in the whoopie-cushion and fake dog-doo industries! Without jerks to buy their product, you’d force their families to starve!

You heartless bastards!