Ah, but how does it compare to liquid nitrogen?
a) The perception is that SUVs are safer. The data, as referenced above, does not support it.
b) If they were safer, should that entitle a driver to put others on the road ( ie me) at risk? Yeah, its a free country.
c) Drive a SUV, support terrorism. You are contributing directly to our dependence on Saudi oil, and all that follows from that.
d) Drive a SUV and make this world a warmer place. Globally, doncha know.
e) Blame the gubbermint for exempting them from regulation as cars, when they are clearly marketed and sold as such. This was the loophole that became big enough to drive an Excursion through.
f) I get through the snow and ice, in Chicago no less, just fine in my little Honda Civic. Never stuck. Never skidded out. Compared to all those SUVs skidding out and getting stuck because their drivers think that being an SUV exempts them from thinking when driving on snow or ice. I am at one with my slide; it is part of turn.
I’ll stop here. F seems an approriate place to stop on the subject of SUVs.
Good for you. You wouldn’t get to my house however. Perhaps that is a good thing.
So you have no need to tow, or haul lots of stuff. Fine.
Different people, different needs. Simple. You would like to have people change their lifestyle to suit your needs. Not even needs really. Your limited view of how the world should be. Everyone get in line cause you think you know what is best for others.
And YOU have a functional reason to drive one, being within eyesight of nowhere and all. But these yahoos in the suburbs whose hauling is six bags of Whole Foods groceries …
It seems that a few of the advantages of an SUV (e.g. not getting stuck in the mud or snow) can also be had in a regular old passenger car, if the car has 4-wheel drive capability (and perhaps special tires).
BTW – what’s the difference between “4-wheel drive”, “part-time 4-wheel drive”, and “all-wheel drive”, anyway?
Hang on a second here, you superior anti-SUV folks. I take it that you all drive Toyota Echos?
A Toyota Echo has lots of room inside. It gets about 40mpg. It has four doors, and four seats. It’s a perfectly fine commuting vehicle, that will do all of the utilitarian things other cars will do.
So let’s say you drive, oh, a Ford Taurus. Nice, mid-size sedan. But it only get 26 mpg. So why are you driving a Taurus, you environment-raping scumbags? You’re giving up 14 MPG for what? A little more luxury? A quieter interior? More legroom? For SHAME.
And yet, you then have the NERVE to accuse someone of raping the environment because their choice is slightly worse than yours. Even a gigantic monster SUV like a Cadillac Escalade only gets about 10 mpg less than your Taurus, meaning that their choice is less of a negative difference over your choice than your choice was over something like a Toyota Echo.
How about this for an idea: Everyone who wants to criticise SUVs, please list the car that you personally drive. Let’s get this hypocrisy off the road.
Unless, of course, you do drive an Echo or its equivalent. Then I get to slam on you for driving at all, when it would be much more environmentally friendly and easier on our infrastructure if you just took the bus, you car driving bastard.
Honda Civic HX (the variable transmission jobber that was supposed to increase gas milage) Next car is a hybrid unless I hold out for a fuel cell.
My wife’s car is a minivan (Toyota). We got four kids. They stopped making station wagons with the extra seat unless you go really high end (Audi or Mercedes). Pretty good milage really, and better than taking two other cars most places, especially since most of the time we wouldn’t have two drivers at that time.
But, of course, your premise is fallacious. Never did buy the “let he who without sin …” thang. There are degrees of anything. My yelling once at my kid without good cause does not make me the moral equivilent of someone who beats his kid every day, as much as I wish that I hadn’t yelled.
So, giving up 14 mpg for a little more comfort is a ‘better’ choice than giving up an additional 10mpg for more utility?
And let’s not get started on all the people who buy sports cars, which get worse gas mileage than even SUVs, and which encourage people to drive fast and dangerously. Should we get rid of those too?
I’ve never understood the need to bash other people for their choice in vehicles, ESPECIALLY from those who drive cars themselves. Just the simple act of driving a car makes you more environmentally destructive than 90% of the people on the planet. Yet you feel you have the moral authority to criticise people because their automobile choices differ from yours.
It’s a joke.
I say we all join forces and attack the real menace of the roads:
Stupid garish neon spandex bicycle clothes.
:eek:
I’m with you on that. There’s only so much we should expect to put up with. I say we line them up against the wall right next to guys who are 50 lbs overweight but insist on wearing speedos at the beach.
Plymouth Colt…I get about 33-34 mpg in the winter (when the snow tires are on) and 37-38 in the summer. It’s getting old and I am starting to look at the hybrid version of the Civic as my next car.
In the meantime, I also impose a 100% gas tax on myself for using my car. I.e., I keep track of how much money I spend on gas each year and send a check for that amount to some environmental group at the end of the year (in addition to any other money I am donating to that group or other groups). In fact, this year I took a few longer trips than I had the last 2 years so my tax for the year (which I just computed this morning) is $440. (The previous two years it had been about $350.)
I’m not against people having choices. I am just against them not paying the full costs (or something closer to the full costs) for their choices.
Okay, Jshore. You’re clear. Carry on.
(-:
A) Kudos for putting your money where your mouth is. Not that I agree with your stance in general, it is nice to see you practice it. Not like my neighbor, who has some sort of ‘Got Nature?’ and other ‘green’ bumper stickers…on a 86 Chevy station wagon, that summons a fierce cloud of smoke whenever started.
B) By driving an SUV ('01 Chevy Tahoe here), I use more gas then if I had an econobox. No suprise. But as a result of that, I pay more in gas taxes, which, in theory, pays for the roads, and even a touch of alternative fuel research.
Heck, here in MI, we SUV’rs did more then our share to contribute to the 924 million dollars MI collected in Gasoline taxes. Not to mention the $.015/gallon (I think) we contribute to our national coffers.
RobertTB:
Yeah, but the problem is that the estimated externalized costs are much larger than the taxes that you pay. See http://www.sierraclub.org/sprawl/transportation/control.asp
Even my self-imposed “tax” is below these estimates.
What galls me most is our legislators pandering and whoring to the interests of the auto makers. Most of you will likely recall a few years back when Congress, in a rare moment of brain stem function, was moved to raise the standard for gas efficiency. Big Auto shrieked in porcine rage, the SUV was a Godsend, profits were up, up enough to send a pulse through the viens of a moribund auto industry.
Our legislators, ever cognizent of thier duties to the Republic, dropped to thier knees and performed thier function. The result: the SUV is classifed as a “light truck” and thereby exempt from those rules.
A Parliament of Whores, as Mr. O’Rourke so aptly put it.
elucidator: You have just described ‘regulatory capture’, and it’s one argument libertarians use against large government regulations. Basically, what happens is that the people vote for some new regulation to protect themselves against business. But once the government has entered this space, it becomes ‘captured’ by the industry it is regulatiing, because that industry has the money to pay for lobbyists, and has the interests that keep them engaged long after the public has gone after something else. So you wind up with dairy regulations that protect dairy farmers and hurt the consumer. Or regulations that act to keep competition out of certain markets.
Unfortunately, the alternative that libertarians semm to endorse is not government reforms to reduce this “capture” but instead to just surrender completely to the industries and let them rule supreme in the 1-dollar–1-vote marketplace.
Not all miles-per-gallon are created equal.
Let’s say you want to drive 100 miles. How much gasoline would that consume?[ul][li]In a 40 mpg Toyota Echo: 2.5 gallons[/li][li]In a 26 mpg Ford Taurus: 3.85 gallons[/li][li]In a 16 mpg Chevy Suburban: 6.25 gallons[/ul]So by dropping 14 mpg by going from a Toyota Echo to a Ford Taurus, you consume 1.35 more gallons of gasoline per 100 miles you drive. But by dropping only another 10 mpg by going from a Ford Taurus to a Chevy Suburban, you consume an additional 2.4 more gallons of gasoline per 100 miles you drive![/li]
In other words, going from a 200 mpg moped to a 75 mpg small motorcycle will have much less of an impact on the environment, our oil reserves, our relations with the OPEC nations, etc., than going from a 26 mpg Taurus to a 16 mpg Suburban will.
Sure, when looked at that way. But then the question just becomes, "Why is it okay for a Taurus driver to blow an extra 1.35 gallons of gas for a little extra comfort, when it’s not okay for a Suburban driver to blow an additional 2.4 gallons for his purposes?
And don’t forget that these are extremes. Most SUVs are not Suburbans. They are Explorers, Cherokees, Grand Cherokees, Escapes, etc. The differences in fuel economy are suddenly not that great at all.
For a better comparison, let’s compare a Ford Focus, a Ford Taurus, and a Ford Explorer. Those three vehicles are among the most popular in each of their segments. Here’s the highway fuel economy of each:
Car MPG Gals
---------------------------
Focus: 36 2.8
Taurus: 26 3.8
Explorer: 19 5.3
So in the typical case, a Taurus uses about 1 gallon more than the Focus, and the Explorer uses 1.5 gallons more than the Taurus. So why is it okay to drive a Taurus instead of a Focus, but not okay to drive an Explorer instead of a Taurus?
And an Explorer is actually pretty bad when it comes to SUVs. A Ford Escape, for example, only get 1MPG less than a Taurus (4 MPG with the bigger engine).
If you choose to drive anything other than a gas-miserly econobox like a Focus or a Lancer, you’re in no moral position to criticise people who drive SUVs because they prefer them. You have also made a choice to give up on fuel economy for your own purposes.
Oh, and while we’re at it, let’s talk about the REAL environmental destroyers - people who drive around in old cars. I see people driving around in old Volvos wagons, with “Save the Earth” bumper stickers partially obscured by the vast amounts of blue smoke blowing out of the tailpipe.
if you’ve driving something like a 75 Chevy Nova, you’re probably getting worse gas mileage than a modern SUV, and pumping more pollutants in the air than 10 new cars combined. How come I’m not hearing shrieks of outrage from the eco community over the large numbers of old cars still on the road? Why isn’t there a campaign to get people to scrap them and buy new?
SUV’s are singled out not because of their environmental destruction, but because they are big, expensive, and feed class envy.
I wonder if slave owners countered Nothern factory owners with arguments like - “hey your Black employees are treated less well than your White employees, so my Black slaves are treated worse than your Black employees. I’ve never understood the need to bash others for their treatment of workers. Just the simple act of being a property owner makes you an exploiter of the lower classes. Yet you feel you have the moral authority to criticize me. What a joke.”
One gallon more per hundred miles and subject to safety and clean air regs, vs. 2.5 gallons more per hundred and exempt from car safety and clean air regs. Yeah, I think the Tauras driver is less wasteful and and less of a polluter than the Explorer driver, given that they use their cars the same way.
And if I was a teacher I’d never feed my class envy. I wouldn’t even know how to prepare it. I have no class envy. I just have little respect for egos in need of declaring their status at the expense of the environmeny, at the expense of other’s safety, and atthe expense of domestic security. To me that is no class at all.