{"id":802,"date":"2003-01-02T10:37:00","date_gmt":"2003-01-02T18:37:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2003\/01\/02\/802.html"},"modified":"2003-01-02T10:37:00","modified_gmt":"2003-01-02T18:37:00","slug":"suvs-considered-harmful","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2003\/01\/02\/suvs-considered-harmful\/","title":{"rendered":"SUVs considered harmful"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Wrote this a few days ago, forgot to post it.<\/p>\n

Interesting article about SUVs<\/a> and, more specifically, about \nHigh and Mighty,<\/cite> by Keith Bradsher, a book detailing the \nproblems with SUVs.<\/p>\n

The article is a little annoying in some ways. The first half of \nit focuses heavily on insulting SUV owners, and works in a couple of \nodd digs against liberalism (or at least that's how they sound to \nme). And I'm very skeptical about this bit:<\/p>\n

The Dodge Durango, for instance, was built to \nresemble a savage jungle cat, with vertical bars across the grille to \nrepresent teeth and big jaw-like fenders.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I just can't see the Durango<\/a> as remotely \nresembling a jungle cat of any kind. The vertical bars make the \ngrille look vaguely like the Cheshire Cat's grin, but that's about as \nfar as I'd go in the cat direction.<\/p>\n

But there are some interesting stats later in the article. For example:<\/p>\n

The occupant death rate in SUVs is 6 percent higher \nthan it is for cars—8 percent higher in the largest SUVs. The \nmain reason is that SUVs carry a high risk of \nrollover. . . .<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

On the other hand, the article also throws in some poor \nstatistical comparisons:<\/p>\n

Bradsher reports that four-fifths of those killed in \nroll-overs were not belted in, even though 75 percent of the general \ndriving population now buckles up regularly.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That comparison is very misleading; it should be comparing people \nkilled in SUV rollovers with people killed in non-SUV accidents, not \nwith the general driving population.<\/p>\n

And then there's this:<\/p>\n

When a car is hit from the side by another car, the \nvictim is 6.6 times as likely to die as the aggressor. But if the \naggressor is an SUV, the car driver's relative chance of dying rises \nto 30 to 1, because the hood of an SUV is so high off the \nground.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Presumably also because the SUV-driving \"aggressor\" is less likely \nto die than the car-driving \"aggressor,\" so this too seems like a \nweak statistical comparison.<\/p>\n

Don't get me wrong; I don't like SUVs at all. I know a few people \nwho I think have good reasons for owning them, but mostly I'd be \nquite happy to have them removed from the roads. I think they're bad \nfor the environment (except possibly the all-electric one I've seen \nan ad for), usually unnecessary (at least in urban areas), and dangerous to everyone outside them \nwhether or not they're actually dangerous to those inside them. And \nthe article points out a couple of other interesting things, such as \nthat SUVs aren't really designed to carry as much cargo as you'd \nexpect, and that they \"handle poorly in bad weather and have trouble \nstopping on slick roads.\" I'm all for requiring them to adhere to \ncar emissions standards and so forth.<\/p>\n

But I'd prefer that people making these points wouldn't try to \nbolster the information they're presenting by using misleading \nstatistics and ad hominem attacks.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Wrote this a few days ago, forgot to post it. Interesting article about SUVs and, more specifically, about High and…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-802","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/802","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=802"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/802\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=802"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=802"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=802"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}