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I know a guy who drives a Rolls-Royce Ferret, a 1950's armored car legal for street driving. It's the cheapest Rolls you can buy, costing well less than any new SUV. He said he's crushed two SUV's in crashes; in neither case was the Ferret visibly scratched. (That's what 3/4" armor plate will do for you...) So, there *is* some truth in the get-a-bigger-car methodology. It's just that, as it so happens, SUV's are much more likely to roll in crashes among other problems, so SUV drivers are very likely increasing danger to *themselves* as well as others with their arms race.

What happens when a vehicle with a drunk driver collides with your vehicle? SUV vs. car: people in car survive if they are properly restrained. SUV vs. bike, even with proper helmets: Don't even go there.

While SUVs pose serious safety problems for their occupants, recent studies are showing that SUVs are greatly increasing the danger on our roads for drivers and passengers in other cars. Federal information shows that although light trucks account for one-third of all registered vehicles, traffic crashes between a light truck and any other vehicle now account for the majority of fatalities in vehicle-to-vehicle collisions. Of the 5,259 fatalities caused when light trucks struck cars in 1996, 81 percent of the fatally injured were occupants of the car.(9) In multiple-vehicle crashes, the occupants of the car are four times more likely to be killed than the occupants of the SUV.(10) In a side-impact collision with an SUV, car occupants are 27 times more likely to die.(11),

Federal information shows that although light trucks account for one-third of all registered vehicles, traffic crashes between a light truck and any other vehicle now account for the majority of fatalities in vehicle-to-vehicle collisions. Of the 5,259 fatalities caused when light trucks struck cars in 1996, 81 percent of the fatally injured were occupants of the car.(9) In multiple-vehicle crashes, the occupants of the car are four times more likely to be killed than the occupants of the SUV.(10) In a side-impact collision with an SUV, car occupants are 27 times more likely to die.(11)

This study was very important because it examined how many car occupants killed in accidents with SUVs might have survived had the accidents involved passenger cars weighing the same as SUVs. This is in important finding, because auto manufacturers have maintained that the weight of SUVs make them dangerous to smaller cars, not the design. The NHTSA study concludes that 2,000 people would have survived if their vehicles had been hit by a heavy car instead of a heavy SUV. Two thousand is five percent of the nation's annual traffic fatalities. The study declares that light trucks and SUVs are twice as likely to cause a fatality in the struck car than a passenger car of comparable weight.(13)

In response to studies like this, automakers have begun saying they will make changes to make SUVs more compatible with other cars. When Ford Motor Company introduced it's new monster, the Excursion (19 feet long, 6 1/2 feet wide, and weighing in at 8,500 pounds), Ford added a front beam and a rear tow hitch to prevent other vehicles from sliding under the Excursion during an accident. The Excursion will be the largest SUV on the market and could be extremely dangerous in an accident with a smaller vehicle since almost every vehicle on the road is smaller. Ford has not added the safety beam to its other SUVs.

The compatibility issue is not confined to crashes. The size and design of SUVs raises other safety issues. For instance, placement of headlights is a serious nuisance and a potential safety problem. On large SUVs, the headlights are mounted higher than on cars. Large SUVs have headlights mounted 36 to 39 inches above the ground - the same height as the side mirror on a small car. The glare from SUVs' headlights can appear to other drivers as bright as high beams. Glare can be 10 to 20 times worse than recommended levels when headlights are at the height of a driver's eyes or side mirror, according to a study by the Society of Automotive Engineers. (14)

Until just recently, liability rates were the same no matter what you drove. Collision rates have always been lower for SUVs, because they suffer less damage in accidents.

In the New York Times, Diane S. Tasaka, a spokeswoman for Farmers Insurance, states "The regular car drivers are subsidizing SUV and pickup drivers on liability insurance." (8)

That's from the first report Google turned up, here.

Of the 5,259 fatalities caused when light trucks struck cars in 1996, 81 percent of the fatally injured were occupants of the car. In multiple-vehicle crashes, the occupants of the car are four times more likely to be killed than the occupants of the SUV. In a side-impact collision with an SUV, car occupants are 27 times more likely to die.

Of course, that's generally recognized as the party line of people who want to do away with SUVs for more political reasons (bad for the environment, conspicuous display of wealth gap). Still, people are using that exact reason to explain why noone should be allowed to drive them.

This is a widespread misconception, akin to saying that if everyone drove Volvos, just as many people would die in traffic accidents as they do now. Millions of Americans have purchased large SUVs that tend to roll over three times more frequently than other automobiles. Volvos, on the other hand, are built with safety as a primary goal.

By the same token, would you expect an OpenBSD server to have the same level of default security protection as a Windows 2000 server? OpenBSD is built with the primary intention of being the world's most secure OS. Nowhere on the Windows 2000 product page do we see anything at all relating to security.

You can't assign positive characteristics to an OS on one hand (Windows XP doesn't crash as often as Windows 98) and then dismiss negative comparisons (Windows is less secure by default than Mac OS X or Linux).

Blame users all you want, but there are millions of uninformed Mac users out there. Believe it or not, in spite of their uninformed nature, they don't have to deal with anything like the litany of security and stability issues that confront Windows users.

It's hard to believe when you've been struggling with Windows for years and have grown accustomed to it, but while Linux and Macintosh aren't immune to security problems, the trojan horses and viruses that plague Windows users are a direct result of Microsoft's development philosophy, which emphasizes market dominance over quality.

Your huge SUV will then encourage other people to buy huge SUVs as well, to be "safe" from you -- making you less safe again. At the end of the game, we will all be driving gigantic monstrosities that get 5 miles per gallon, and nobody will be any safer than before -- pedestrians, bicyclists, and everyone else not in an SUV will be much less safe.

And the real irony is, this whole arms race is based on a fallacy: SUVs are not safer than passenger cars.

Before SUVs people were able to deal.... because they used vans and pickups.

The problem is that SUVs are designed poorly for sharing the road with non-SUVs (higher fatality rate in the other "car"), and design poorly period (roll overs). Pickups and vans don't suffer from these problems.

I'll see your pundit quote and raise you an article based on research from the National Highway Traffic Safety Association and the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety:

Federal information shows that although light trucks account for one-third of all registered vehicles, traffic crashes between a light truck and any other vehicle now account for the majority of fatalities in vehicle-to-vehicle collisions. Of the 5,259 fatalities caused when light trucks struck cars in 1996, 81 percent of the fatally injured were occupants of the car. In multiple-vehicle crashes, the occupants of the car are four times more likely to be killed than the occupants of the SUV. In a side-impact collision with an SUV, car occupants are 27 times more likely to die.

People defending SUVs (usually SUV owners and manufacturers) also have an agenda. I don't think you're going to get much more unbiased than the NHTSA and IIHS.

I know, maybe we should put a tax on gasoline. You know, the heavier the auto and the farther you drive the more taxes you pay. Wow, why didn't anyone think of tha.... oh, never mind.. they have.

What is your point? I was pointing out that we already have a system of using taxes to support roads, and no information about where we travel is gathered. This is that system. What are you arguing with, exactly?

statistics show that single males under the age of 25 cause more accidents as well. Should we tax them above and beyond the norm...

I was talking about insurance, not taxes, and I thought it was pretty clear. Insurance is graded by a person's demographic, and young single males are charged more than others for insurance. Are you arguing that this is unfair?

Contrary to your post, I haven't advocated a tax on SUVs. I was merely pointing out that a tax that required extensive data-gathering of the sort you suggest would be an exception to the way taxes usually work. An extra, mileage-based tax on SUVs is more feasable and less problematic than you suggest.

If an accident happens and death is involved you can be damn sure its going to get more attention than your average fender bender. I think the police/court will have more information on hand than simply witness testimony.

What information could the police possibly have other than witness testimony?

Perhaps you mean the police would try to obtain testimony from witnesses who were not actually involved in the accident. It would certainly be commendable for the police to do so. Did you know that fatal accidents are actually disproportionately rual, not urban? More accidents happen in urban areas, but the speeds are lower and they tend to be less serious. Many serious traffic accidents have no non-involved witnesses.

You haven't shown that SUVs are the cause of more accidents, just that if your in one you're more likely to survive. Now, had you shown that SUVs cause more accidents you *might* have something.

Actually, I'm showing that if you're driving an SUV, you're more likely to survive an accident - because the other vehicle most likely will suffer much more than yours. I'm not even trying to show that SUVs cause more accidents. SUVs don't have to cause more accidents than cars to pose a hazard. If the accidents involving SUVs are more deadly, you'll end up with more total deaths even if the number of accidents stays the same. This may actually be happening; traffic deaths have recently started to rise for the first time in decades.

In another message you posted on this same subject, you actually admit that:

I never said that SUVs that have more mass didn't crash with more force.

I have a hunch that there [is evidence for] accidents involving one SUV and non SUVs result in a higher death rate.

lets assume that [accidents involving one SUV and non SUVs result in a higher death rate] is true...

Who's side are you on here, anyway? At least in that post you said something that made some sense:

I would also then think that a crash involving a Lincon Town Car and a Fiat would result in the person in the Fiat dying more often than two Fiats crashing (or two Town cars crashing). Or an accident with a Fiat and a cyclist. If everyone's so hell bent about size/saftey why the witchhunt after SUVs and not *all* autos?

Yes, in a small car/large car collision, the small care fares worse. But there are numbers for this stuff. SUVs, largely because of the high bumpers, are much worse than even the largest large cars. A quote from the safety page at suv.org:

The NHTSA study concludes that 2,000 people would have survived if their vehicles had been hit by a heavy car instead of a heavy SUV. Two thousand is five percent of the nation's annual traffic fatalities. The study declares that light trucks and SUVs are twice as likely to cause a fatality in the struck car than a passenger car of comparable weight.

As for why the "witchhunt" focuses on SUVs in particular, well, do the math. What car is even remotely in the same class as these behemoths? What car weighs as much as a Chevy Suburban or Ford Excursion? There is no such beast. According to the study mentioned above, a Chevy Suburban is probably about *twice* as dangerous as a car *of the same mass* - and there are no such cars. The very biggest cars only weigh about half of what these monsters weigh. These giant vehicles aren't just slightly more dangerous than passenger cars - they're a lot more dangerous.

Sometimes, when people get alarmed, it's because something alarming is happening. It's not always a "witchhunt" or hysteria.

Its a free country folks...

The country may be free, but the roads are not. Nor should they be. There is already extensive regulation for the roads and the vehicles that ride on them. The US at least is (at least by reputation) a representative democracy; if the people decide to regulate SUVs harshly, so be it. Civil liberties are not at stake. The constitution does not grant people the right to drive at all, much less to drive whatever they want however they want.

Lets lower the crash energy of every vehicle while we're at it. Lets lower the speed limit to 5 MPH...

You're right, that's silly, let's all drive souped-up Kenworth semi-tractors at 180MPH everywhere we go, that would be much more reasonable. Reductio ad absurdum cuts both ways.

So, you're willing to give up your privacy to allow the gov't to track everywhere you've traveled? Remember, if we're compensating for the wear and tear on a road they're going to need more than simply milage.

Few taxes work that way. Property taxes to support schools are not dependent on how many school-age children the taxpayer actually has, for example, and taxes paid to support the local police force aren't graded depending on the quality of the taxpayer's neighborhood. And for that matter, we already pay taxes to support the roads, without supplying any information at all about where we go when we drive.

A real-world tax like this would be based on mileage, the proceeds divided among the local road-maintaining agencies according to some precalculated formula. It would not be perfectly accurate. Taxes like these are not.

The second they find statistical evidence that SUVs (and SUVs alone, they control for the usual supsects: age, gender, marital status, past history, etc...) are causing them to lose more money (due to claims) than any other vehicle you can bet your bottom dollar that rates on SUVs are going to rise (if they haven't already).

Your argument sounds good at first, but it's weakness is actually something you touch on. Insurance rates don't correspond with hazards, but with *claims*, and claims and hazards may not always be perfectly proportional.

Studies have found that in fatal collisions between SUVs and ordinary cars, the people in the car are about 30 times more likely to die than the people in the SUV. A person who dies instantly does so quite cheaply, whereas a crippling injury or a long, lingering death in the hospital is more expensive.

Additionally, dead people make pretty poor courtroom witnesses - it may be a lot harder to show that an accident is the other driver's fault (thus using his insurance to cover the costs) if you're dead.

Combine these factors with the fact that the SUV passengers are likely to be unhurt, even if the passengers in the car have been killed, and you have a formula for actually lowering the insurance rates for SUVs, even though they are a greater hazard to other vehicles on the road. This is exactly what has happened.

In any case, I don't think it's quite as simple as (more_dangerous) == (more_expensive). Once you pass a certain danger point, the cost isn't money anymore, but human lives.

YES! Because today's SUV pollutes less than an economy car from the 70s. I guess speaking the truth does require "balls".

Yes, I'm sure they pollute less than coal trains and volcanoes too. Irrelevant. 70's econo-boxes were designed to save gas, and probably spit out greenhouse gases like crazy. Back then nobody knew any better. Now we do. Where did you get this tidbit anyway?

I didn't say anything about the Kyoto treaty one way or another. Does it actually have any effect on SUV's?

My main point is that it's not just FUD that people hate SUV's. They're unsafe (well for everybody ELSE anyway), are actually REVERSING the trend in US fuel efficiency, and they're too big for drivers to park correctly or drive within the lanes (this just coming from my observation and dings in my doors).

As far as your popularity "argument", I KNOW they're popular. So is crack. That's the whole problem. I'm tempted to buy one myself so when a soccer mom yelling at her kids in the back seat slams into me, I'm not killed.

YES! Because today's SUV pollutes less than an economy car from the 70s. I guess speaking the truth does require "balls".

Yes, I'm sure they pollute less than coal trains and volcanoes too. Irrelevant. 70's econo-boxes were designed to save gas, and probably spit out greenhouse gases like crazy. Back then nobody knew any better. Now we do. Where did you get this tidbit anyway?

I didn't say anything about the Kyoto treaty one way or another. Does it actually have any effect on SUV's?

My main point is that it's not just FUD that people hate SUV's. They're unsafe (well for everybody ELSE anyway), are actually REVERSING the trend in US fuel efficiency, and they're too big for drivers to park correctly or drive within the lanes (this just coming from my observation and dings in my doors).

As far as your popularity "argument", I KNOW they're popular. So is crack. That's the whole problem. I'm tempted to buy one myself so when a soccer mom yelling at her kids in the back seat slams into me, I'm not killed.

YES! Because today's SUV pollutes less than an economy car from the 70s. I guess speaking the truth does require "balls".

Yes, I'm sure they pollute less than coal trains and volcanoes too. Irrelevant. 70's econo-boxes were designed to save gas, and probably spit out greenhouse gases like crazy. Back then nobody knew any better. Now we do. Where did you get this tidbit anyway?

I didn't say anything about the Kyoto treaty one way or another. Does it actually have any effect on SUV's?

My main point is that it's not just FUD that people hate SUV's. They're unsafe (well for everybody ELSE anyway), are actually REVERSING the trend in US fuel efficiency, and they're too big for drivers to park correctly or drive within the lanes (this just coming from my observation and dings in my doors).

As far as your popularity "argument", I KNOW they're popular. So is crack. That's the whole problem. I'm tempted to buy one myself so when a soccer mom yelling at her kids in the back seat slams into me, I'm not killed.

I'm sure what you meant to say there was "SUVs are safer than smaller cars because you can drive them over other cars more easily". Although technically that's still wrong because SUVs are officially trucks. Also, here's a small collection of links about SUVs.

It's perfectly fitting that this inefficient bloated monster should run Java onboard...