Gato_Solo
Out-freaking-standing OTC member
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SPORT UTILITY VEHICLES have taken over America’s roads during the last decade, and are on their way to taking over the world’s roads. The four-wheel-drive vehicles offer a romantic vision of outdoor adventure to deskbound baby boomers. The larger models provide lots of room for families and their gear. Their size gives them an image of safety. The popularity of SUVs has revived the economy of
the upper Midwest and has helped power the American economy since the early 1990s.
Yet the proliferation of SUVs has created huge problems. Their safe image is an illusion. They roll over too easily, killing and injuring occupants at an alarming rate, and they are dangerous to other
road users, inflicting catastrophic damage to cars that they hit and posing a lethal threat to pedestrians. Their “green” image is also a mirage, because they contribute far more than cars to smog and global warming. Their gas-guzzling designs increase American dependence on imported oil at a time when anti-American sentiment is prevalent in the Middle East.
The success of SUVs comes partly from extremely cynical design and marketing decisions by automakers and partly from poorly drafted government regulations. The manufacturers’ market researchers have decided that millions of baby boomers want an adventurous image and care almost nothing about putting others at risk to achieve it, so they have told auto engineers to design vehicles accordingly. The result has been unusually tall, menacing vehicles like the Dodge Durango, with its grille resembling a jungle cat’s teeth and its flared fenders that look like bulging muscles in a savage jaw.Automakers are able to produce behemoths that guzzle gas, spew pollution and endanger their occupants and other motorists because of loopholes in government regulations. When the United States imposed safety, environmental and tax rules on automobiles in the 1970s, much tougher standards were set for cars than for pickup trucks, vans and the off-road vehicles that have since evolved into sport utility vehicles. Many of these loopholes still exist, and have spread to other countries that have copied American regulations. The result has been a public policy disaster, with automakers given an enormous and unintended incentive to shift production away from cars and toward inefficient, unsafe, heavily polluting SUVs.
No automotive safety issue has ever captured the nation’s attention with such intensity as the many rollover crashes of Ford Explorer sport utility vehicles equipped with Firestone tires that failed. Ford and Firestone have been rightly condemned for cutting corners in the design and manufacturing of the Explorer and the tires, and for doing little for several years as some of their employees learned of problems with the tires.
Yet terrible as the tire-related crashes have been, killing as many as 300 people worldwide over the last decade, they are just a tiny part of the safety and environmental problems associated with sport utility vehicles. These problems are already needlessly killing thousands of Americans each year. Hundreds of people are also dying unnecessarily in other countries that are starting to use large numbers of SUVs.
The height and width of the typical SUV make it hard for car drivers behind it to see the road ahead, increasing the chance that they will be unable to avoid a crash, especially a multi-vehicle pileup. The stiff, truck-like underbody of an SUV does little to absorb the force of collisions with trees and other roadside objects. Its size increases traffic congestion, because car drivers tend to give sport utility vehicles a lot of room, so fewer vehicles can get through each green light at an intersection. Most of the nation’s roadside guardrails were built for low-riding cars, and may flip an SUV on impact instead of deflecting it safely back into its lane of traffic. The truck like brakes and suspensions of SUVs mean that their stopping distances are longer than for a family car, making it less likely that an SUV driver will be able to stop before hitting a car. And when SUVs do hit pedestrians, they strike them high on the body, inflicting worse injuries than cars, which have low bumpers that flip pedestrians onto the relatively soft hood.
For all their deadliness to other motorists, SUVs are no safer than cars for their own occupants. Indeed, they are less safe. The occupant death rate per million SUVs is actually 6 percent higher than the occupant death rate per million cars. The biggest SUVs, which pose the greatest hazards to other motorists, have an 8 percent higher death rate for their occupants than minivans and the larger midsize cars like the Ford Taurus and Pontiac Grand Prix.
How is this possible? SUV occupants simply die differently, being much more likely than car occupants to die in rollovers, as well as being much more likely to send other drivers to the grave.
SUV occupants also face a higher risk of paralysis. While no national studies have been done, statewide studies in Arkansas and Utah have found that rollovers account for nearly half of all cases of paralysis. Put another way, rollovers cause almost as many paralyzing spinal injuries as all illnesses, falls and every other form of traffic accident combined-even though rollovers make up less than 1 percent of all crashes.
Worst of all, we have only seen the beginnings of the SUV problem, which is certain to become much bigger and much deadlier in the years to come. The safety hazards of SUVs have been mitigated until now because they have mainly attracted the safest drivers in America. The principal buyers of SUVs in the 1990s and early 2000s have been baby boomers in their 40s, with some sales to people in their 30s and 50s. These affluent first owners of SUVs tend to be the most cautious drivers on the road, because they are mostly middle-aged people who have plenty of driving experience and still have acute vision, hearing and mental faculties. Half of them also have families, so they are much less likely to be out driving in the wee hours of the morning, when crash rates soar.
There are 20 million SUVs on the nation’s roads and more than half of them are less than five years old. Three-quarters of the fullsize SUVs, the largest models, are also under five years old. As affluent, cautious-driving baby boomers begin to sell their SUVs or turn them in at the end of leases, the used-vehicle market will be flooded with these vehicles. Falling prices will make them more attractive to younger drivers and drivers with poor safety records-including drunk drivers. The only thing more frightening for traffic safety experts than a drunk or young person behind the wheel of a new SUV is a drunk or young person behind the wheel of an old SUV with failing brakes and other maintenance problems.
Traditional SUVs, which use the same underbodies as pickup trucks, have climbed from 1.78 percent of new vehicles sold in 1982 to 6.7 percent in 1991 and 16.1 percent in 1997, and have since leveled off at about 17 percent. The change has been even swifter at the luxury end of the auto market, with SUVs rising from less than one-twentieth of the market in 1990 to half the luxury market by 1996. But SUVs still make up only 10 percent of the vehicles currently registered in the United States. Most of the automobiles
built in the 1980s are still on the road, and these are mostly cars, so this has been holding down the percentage of all vehicles on the road that are SUVs. As older model years of vehicles are scrapped, however, they are being replaced with new model years in which a much larger proportion of the vehicles are SUVs.
This will eventually make SUVs nearly twice as common as they are now.
Oops...How embarassing...Here's the source.