What the heck is this supposed to mean?
You have 3000 posts, but your last one dosn’t mean a thing.
Only jerks buy SUV’s? Is that your opinion?
Bryan, I may be a newbie but shouldn’t bitch sessions be reserved for IMHO and MPSIMS? Or the pit?
was I whooosed?
looks at enipla
looks at thread title
looks at watch
looks at enipla again
Driving is a priviledge, not a right. What you drive on public roads affects everyone else who uses them. You don’t have to defend what you drive, but refusing to acknowledge that your choices affect others is a pretty good validation of this thread’s title. It doesn’t damn you forever to admit this. Everyone’s a jerk sometimes.
And I’ll second Princhester. The subject is dealing with statistics about all SUVs being more deadly in various ways than all non-SUVs. Personal anecdotes mean absolutely nothing in this discussion. Particularly in this case, because the people who were killed in SUV-related accidents won’t be contributing any opposing anecdotes of their own. They’re all dead.
Blaming the deaths on bad drivers is also a meaningless ruse. Reckless drivers are the given against which the effectiveness of our rules governing driving safety are measured. We know people are going to drive recklessly (or merely badly… I don’t want to imply there’s always malice involved). They are not a variable; they are a constant. How much carnage they inflict on the driving population is a function of the specs of the vehicles available to the driving population, since a given percentage of that population are guaranteed to drive recklessly.
Futile Gesture also makes a good point about the relationship between the advantages of SUVs and disadvantages of everything else on the road. Your better view is my bigger obstruction. This does have a bearing on your safety, as well. Do the advantages of your single better view of the road outweigh the additional risk imposed on everyone (including you) by the multiple drivers whose view you have obstructed?
What effect will an ever-escalating competition to have the highest vehicle that affords the greatest view of the road have on the total driving population? You end up in a situation where the people who consistently have a safety advantage are a small minority who can afford buying the largest vehicles the most frequently. If you impost strict regulations on size, a much larger percentage of the total driving population have a consistent safety advantage, because there is no impetus to compete on size anymore… it’s illegal to have big vehicles period.
In case it matters, I’m not an SUV-hater. I know too many people that drive them. And I ride in the biggest vehicle of all… the bus.
-fh
I don’t think any discussion of the safety of SUVs vs smaller cars is complete without considering the impact of the reduced visibility of the other cars. Rollovers and collisions are an important measure of the safety of these vehicles, but these are rare occurences; my own safety is being compromised every time I drive my sedan and can’t see anything ahead of me while driving 60 mph. I think this is by far the biggest safety issue regarding SUVs - it’s a daily fact of life making driving more dangerous for everyone who isn’t in a higher-seated vehicle.
I have no statistics on how much more dangerous every trip I take now is (and data on that would be very difficult to collect), but on purely anecdotal evidence, I have encountered three different situations in the last couple of months where I was put in very dangerous situations by following an SUV that I couldn’t see around. There is no doubt in my mind that driving is becoming more dangerous for me with every SUV that hits the roads here.
As for owners of SUVs being jerks, the people posting in this thread alone seem to have little consideration for the impact of their choice of ride on the people around them.
(Oh, as for the argument that there have always been big vehicles on the road, these large vehicles have never made up so large a percentage of the vehicles on the road. Not even close.)
Bless you for your excellent summary, hazel-rah. The explosion of the SUV market in recent years has made it well-nigh impossible for me to obey Rule #1 of my driving instruction: look well ahead. I was taught that if you couldn’t see well ahead because the road was blocked by a larger vehicle, you should make an effort to either get around that vehicle, change lanes, or back well off. These days, from the perspective of my Tercel, I can’t see well ahead of any of the dozen or so SUVs I must travel with on any given day. The SUV driver’s argument here suggests that I should, therefore, get an SUV, which is patently a load of horse pucky.
As hazel-rah pointed out, lousy drivers are a fact of life on the road–last time I looked at a bell curve, half of all drivers were below average. Does anyone here honestly think that the entire population of current SUV drivers would submit to retesting and not cry “discrimination?” Again, knowing that bad drivers are everywhere, why would we continue to allow this many of them to drive vehicles which are so obviously dangerous?
I also don’t accept this whole “but my family is safe. It’s not my truck’s fault that the guy in the Escort is dead” argument. It is also not the fault of the Escort in the collision that your bumper came through his side window, crushing his skull, seatbeat or not. The fact is that when an SUV is involved in an accident, people die, regardless of where those people are and that is what should concern every one of us.
Don’t get me wrong. I do understand that there is a place for SUVs–off road, where they earn their sport designation or full of lumber to earn the utility designation. But the excuse that you “need” an SUV to drive, by yourself, to work and back is simply hogwash.
Famous, dead Canadian Wilfrid Laurier once said “A person’s rights end precisely where the next person’s begins.” I think the equal right of all motorists to a safe, unobstructed drive far outweighs the desire to drive an SUV which compromises the safety of everyone.
From this site:
Everyone agrees that not endangering others is a valid principle, except that it’s valid for me to buy a hulking SUV to keep my family safe, don’t worry about it endangering others.
Everyone else who has accidents in SUV’s is a bad driver, but it won’t happen to me cos I’m a great driver [cite?]. Consider Dread Pirate Jumbo’s unarguable truth: 50% of all SUV drivers are of below average driving ability.
I’m not talking about anecdotes about what people use SUV’s for. The OP provides an actual cite to actual research. The reaction of many in this thread has been to suggest that the research is invalid, on the basis of ad hoc anecdotes. Anecdotal evidence is bullshit. My friend of mine’s grandfather smoked all his life and lived to 85. A father of a friend of mine was in a chopper in Vietnam, was shot down, the chopper was a fireball and he survived. There are/were numerous jews who survived Auschwitz. Are you going to tell me smoking, crashing helicopters and Auschwitz are or were harmless?
Bullshit. How can you possibly justify this statement? What part of this thread proves any such thing?
Extraordinary. The OP quotes certain research. Various posters have speculated that the research may be mistaken or biased without a shred of actual evidence or a single cite to back their speculation.
And the next thing we know, you seem to be accepting as a matter of fact that the data was gathered with loaded questions.
Can I remind you again that the most controversial data, the data that lead to the rather sensational thread title was gathered by the country’s leading automakers. Not by conservationist groups. Not by Ralph Nader. Not by consumer groups. Simply by auto makers seeking to determine how to focus their advertising. What possible reason would they have for asking loaded questions? Do you think they were trying to fuck up their own research because they just love wasting their marketing budget?
You seem to think that the only reason a person buys an SUV is safety. That’s just not true.
What about the special pleading from the anti-SUV group? Most of whom apply their standards, principles and rules on others. I.E. I don’t need one therefor no-one else does.
From Princhester -
>>I’m not talking about anecdotes about what people use SUV’s for.
Then what anecdotes are you talking about?
From Bryan-
looks at enipla
looks at thread title
looks at watch
looks at enipla again
So you are saying that since I drive an SUV I’m a jerk. Since you don’t know me from Adam, I assume that applies to other SUV drivers as well. It must make life easy to be able to instantly classify such large groups of people.
Did I say that? I think not. I own my own SUV for reasons other than safety. In fact, I own my SUV despite my concerns about it’s lack of safety because of its advantage to me in another way (namely that I go camping regularly in places with no roads (and no traction:)). I would love to have an SUV which I used only for that purpose, (because they are crap vehicles for anything else) and another ordinary car for ordinary purposes. Unfortunately, having to operate two cars has its own problems. What disturbs me about other SUV owners in this thread is their “head in the sand” attitude towards the unsafe aspects of SUV’s.
I’m sorry but you do not appear to understand what special pleading is. Applying standards and rules to others is not special pleading, unless you do not apply that standard to yourself. Nor is it special pleading to excuse yourself from a particular rule for a specific reason. As I did in my previous point.
What you seem to be missing is the entire point of the OP. No one (or at least certainly not me) is suggesting that there should be no SUV’s. Some people have good practical reasons to need them.
But the research quoted by the OP proves what many anti-SUV people suspect: many people buy SUV’s for very jerkish reasons.
For example, the anecdotes (such as those from H8_2_W8) by which it is attempted to discredit actual research by referring to singular instances in which SUV’s are driven by unsafe people (as if unsafe people don’t drive sedans too. Pfffh).
As to Bryan’s comment, you have been seriously whoooshed.
Same here. Many of the anti-SUV crowd don’t see the many different reasons a person might choose an SUV. I think that the different lifestyles between the pro and con groups will make it impossible for us to find common ground.
On an unrelated note - We had a moose in our yard last night and again this morning. Iv’e seen countless fox, deer and even a couple of black bears, but the moose suprised me.
She was licking the salt off of my Pathfinder. I got a moose wash. Guess it’s time to suds down the car.
We called the division of wildlife because we thought she might be hurt. They came out, saw our moose, and told us to keep an eye on her. Her back is as high as the top of my Pathfinder, kind of hard to miss something like that walking around:p
Take care everyone, have a nice holiday - enipla.