SUVs considered harmful
Wrote this a few days ago, forgot to post it.
Interesting article about SUVs and, more specifically, about High and Mighty, by Keith Bradsher, a book detailing the problems with SUVs.
The article is a little annoying in some ways. The first half of it focuses heavily on insulting SUV owners, and works in a couple of odd digs against liberalism (or at least that's how they sound to me). And I'm very skeptical about this bit:
The Dodge Durango, for instance, was built to resemble a savage jungle cat, with vertical bars across the grille to represent teeth and big jaw-like fenders.
I just can't see the Durango as remotely resembling a jungle cat of any kind. The vertical bars make the grille look vaguely like the Cheshire Cat's grin, but that's about as far as I'd go in the cat direction.
But there are some interesting stats later in the article. For example:
The occupant death rate in SUVs is 6 percent higher than it is for cars—8 percent higher in the largest SUVs. The main reason is that SUVs carry a high risk of rollover. . . .
On the other hand, the article also throws in some poor statistical comparisons:
Bradsher reports that four-fifths of those killed in roll-overs were not belted in, even though 75 percent of the general driving population now buckles up regularly.
That comparison is very misleading; it should be comparing people killed in SUV rollovers with people killed in non-SUV accidents, not with the general driving population.
And then there's this:
When a car is hit from the side by another car, the victim is 6.6 times as likely to die as the aggressor. But if the aggressor is an SUV, the car driver's relative chance of dying rises to 30 to 1, because the hood of an SUV is so high off the ground.
Presumably also because the SUV-driving "aggressor" is less likely to die than the car-driving "aggressor," so this too seems like a weak statistical comparison.
Don't get me wrong; I don't like SUVs at all. I know a few people who I think have good reasons for owning them, but mostly I'd be quite happy to have them removed from the roads. I think they're bad for the environment (except possibly the all-electric one I've seen an ad for), usually unnecessary (at least in urban areas), and dangerous to everyone outside them whether or not they're actually dangerous to those inside them. And the article points out a couple of other interesting things, such as that SUVs aren't really designed to carry as much cargo as you'd expect, and that they "handle poorly in bad weather and have trouble stopping on slick roads." I'm all for requiring them to adhere to car emissions standards and so forth.
But I'd prefer that people making these points wouldn't try to bolster the information they're presenting by using misleading statistics and ad hominem attacks.