BlogWood: MT Archives

Warm, safe, round liquidy goodness

There sure are a lot of SUV crashes in the news lately. Rollovers are common, and fatalities are rising, yet many people invoke safety to justify their new SUV.

Big feeling of invincibility in an SUV, of a high and mighty driving position that gives you that commanding sensation, so strong and so powerful that you are willing to overlook that it's just an illusion, deceptive and harmful given how SUVs actually have more accidents, actually cause more accidents than passenger cars because they can't maneuver in emergency situations and can't stop in rain or snow and tend to flip over easier than Paris Hilton after a dozen Bacardi shooters.

And then you hear that, according to the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, minivans are 10 times safer than SUVs in a crash. Whoops.

Truth is, small, nimble passenger cars may not survive a head-on collision with a Freightliner quite as well as your bigass Navigator, dude, but they do a hell of a lot better avoiding it in the first place. Which is why rates of serious accidents and incidents of death are actually lower for smaller cars than almost any lurching monster truck on the road. Period.

So, despite the mounting evidence to the contrary, why do folks continue to feel safer in a truck which was never designed with safety in mind? Well, first there’s

air bags everywhere. Then there's this notion that you need to be up high. That's a contradiction, because the people who buy these S.U.V.s know at the cortex level that if you are high there is more chance of a rollover. But at the reptilian level they think that if I am bigger and taller I'm safer. You feel secure because you are higher and dominate and look down. That you can look down is psychologically a very powerful notion. And what was the key element of safety when you were a child? It was that your mother fed you, and there was warm liquid. That's why cupholders are absolutely crucial for safety. If there is a car that has no cupholder, it is not safe. If I can put my coffee there, if I can have my food, if everything is round, if it's soft, and if I'm high, then I feel safe.

Oh. Cupholders. Shit. Now my Yertle link is useless. Oh well. Back to Morford, where we learn

how the U.S. consumes 20 million barrels of oil each day, with passenger vehicles burning up three quarters of the total -- and SUVs alone burn half the total for all passenger cars, far more than their fair share and more petroleum than our entire country produces in a year.

And then you learn how that little pip-squeak tyrant Saddam was sitting on 10 percent of the world's oil reserves and that he might have once thought about threatening the nearby 60 percent owned by our buddies the terrorist-lovin', women-slappin' Saudis, and you realize that anyone who thinks we're in Iraq for democracy or humanity's sake is absolutely full of Rumsfeld.

Look. I know many people who own SUVs. Good people. Lovely people. Friends. Family. I know their arguments for owning them. I know that they know, deep down, that most of those arguments hold little sway and most are rather hollow and the result of slick marketing and just a little bit of fear.

And I know there is no accounting for taste and that a big part of the sad American ideology is a willful separation of cause and effect, and that there are worse atrocities in the world than owning a shiny black knobby-tired 5-ton Ford Expedition that never sees anything more rugged than a pothole in the Krispy Kreme drive-thru.

But, really, we have to just admit it: the SUV is hypocrisy incarnate. It is the perfect emblem for the American view, for our position in the world: gluttonous, vain, mostly useless (over 85 percent of SUVs never see a dirt road, much less need 4-wheel drive), ugly as hell and as graceful or practical as a school bus on an ice-skating rink.