[QUOTE=Fish]
I’ve had this conversation with people before.
“Why do you have an SUV?”
“Because we need it.”
“Oh, really? Tell me.”
“Well, about once a year, we go camping, and there’s 6 of us.”
“So take two cars.”
“No, no, you don’t understand, we neeeeeed the SUV.”
“Seems like an inefficient use of time and money. You could fulfill that need by just taking two cars.”
“Why can’t you accept the fact that we neeeeeed the SUV?”
I totally get where the OP is coming from.
[/QUOTE]
Does it occur to you that this is inexcusably rude? Would you like me to come to your place and start dissecting your property and grilling you on whether you need it all?
No one NEEDS a car. No one NEEDS a home. No one NEEDS to take vacations on jet airliners. You can ride a bicycle, live in dormitory housing or an 800 square foot apartment with your family of three (which would still be living better than most people on the planet), and spend your vacation at home tending a garden so you don’t need to buy food transported in.
If you don’t do these things, you might consider the hypocrisy of getting on your high horse and browbeating your friends who have SUVs.
And by the way, I know SUVs are the devil and all, but do you realize how little they actually add to the energy/global warming problem? Transportation makes up only 25% of energy use. Of that, light trucks make up about 35% of the fleet. Of all light trucks, SUVs make up less than half (the rest are pickup trucks, work vans, etc). That means only about 4% of the energy used in the U.S. goes into SUV’s. Now… The difference in CAFE standards between SUVs and cars is 21 mpg vs 27 mpg. So if you replaced every SUV in the country with a car, you’d change the amount of energy consumed by around 1%.
And of course, some of those SUVs truly are necessary. So you’d have to figure out what percentage of SUV owners don’t really ‘need’ them, and adjust the 1% figure downwards even more.
BTW, how many of you SUV haters take vacations by airplane? A typical jet burns 4.8L/100km. So if you decide to fly to Europe for a vacation instead of staying home (let’s say LA to London), you’ll personally be responsible for burning about 688 litres of fuel for your unnecessary trip. At a typical difference of about 2-3L per 100 Km between an average SUV and an average car, it will take the SUV driver more than a year of typical driving to burn that much extra gas.
So if you fly away for a vacation once a year and drive your Nissan Altima or Honda Accord when at home, you may be burning more fuel and hurting the environment more than the guy who drives a Ford Explorer and goes a couple of hundred miles for a camping trip in his SUV once a year instead of flying.
So get off your high horse.
