Hating Life (and the SUV)
(copyright 2003)

Some nine years ago I leased a Jeep Grand Cherokee. It was November. I remember it. I had just moved to Virginia from Miami. Got the car, and it snowed three feet two days later. Awesome! I ran that damned car in glorious circles all over the Safeway parking lot. Driving around the next day I saw at least five other,  what we now call, SUVs (I think we called them 4x4s before the media got hold of it) on the side of the roads, all-wheel drive drop-outs, surrendered not for loss of forward-traction but for that sudden realization that four-wheel drive helps neither brakes nor visibility.

I never much liked the Jeep. It was the female one's choice. I had a sedan, a Mercury Sable, the leather version of a Taurus. That car I liked. It'd fly down I-66 to where it crosses the Beltway, at that spot where three lanes merge to two -- because Arlington County threw a jealous fit and refused to let the Feds build a full highway through its quiet neighborhoods, settling for 4-lanes of traffic jams rather than six -- and I'd warrior-drive to the last slice of cement before mashing right into slower traffic. Heh, it got my day going. I liked that car. It drove.

The Jeep wasn’t a driver. No question being up high was great, but it didn't drive. The best thing about it was that in those days it spoke in social ambiguity. It was status and utility, and it'd fit anywhere, at the warehouse, the gun range, or the black tie biz downtown. As for a car, it hardly fit more people or more things than my Sable sedan, and far less than my Sable wagons, which for years I turned over in two-year leases. Those wagons had a kind of reverse-coolness about ‘em, that groovin’ suburban chic that played well at the Doral country club and that all my aging friends with five-year olds now practice. Worst of all, the Jeep handled like... like a Jeep. You could drive it fast. You could not drive it hard. You drivers know the difference.

Now comes the New Yorker with another attack on the SUV, "Big and Bad" (Jan. 12, excerpted via an author interview on the web in stupid word play, Road Killers). Here’s the take: the author goes to a Consumer Reports testing track and is given a demonstration with yellow cones of the difference between a Chevy Trailblazer -- “an enormous five-thousand-pound S.U.V.” -- and a Porsche Boxter convertible.

Uh, the Boxter won.

And no, the test wasn’t repeated with a wife, four kids, and two dogs.

From there we’re taken to the American roads, where the SUV gives drivers a sense of safety that, of course, went unrecorded on the Consumer Reports track. The thesis is that SUV owners buy the cars for the appearance, not reality, of safety. See, SUVs aren’t safe, at least not when dodging yellow cones on a test track, yet people buy ‘em because they feel safe, which lulls them into driving unsafely. While we get a later admission that the Trailblazer would be the more survivable in a losing game of chicken with a tractor-trailer, the Porsche is said safer for its greater powers of get-out-of-the-way, something we’re told is called “active safety.” Ever hear of that one? Don’t bother. It won’t fly at a government safety hearing.

Unless, of course, you’re panning SUVs:

In Europe and in Japan, people think of a safe car as a nimble car ... The S.U.V. embodies the opposite logic. The driver is seated as high and far from the road as possible. The vehicle is designed to overcome its environment, not to respond to it .... Jettas are safe because they make their drivers feel unsafe. S.U.V.’s are unsafe because they make their drivers feel safe.

Let’s repeat this in easy English: SUVs are safer than other cars but are more dangerous because drivers think they’re safe which renders them less safe than cars that are more dangerous since danger goes lacking in SUVs and smaller car drivers are scared and SUV drivers aren’t.

See? I’m safer in my tin foil 1997 Ford Escort than you in your Lexus GX470. My Escort puts out 112 horses under severe duress. It gets 12 miles to the gallon because it only moves with the accelerator fully applied. “Brake” with this thing is an adjective, not a noun. To turn with any authority, or at all, I need a court order to treat it as a hostile witness. My mechanic told me the left front wheel was about to come off. (I hadn’t noticed.) It fares better than SUVs in collisions with trucks because it slips underneath. Otherwise the air bag is the first, last, and only line of defense. See, I’m safer because I’m more aware of my death-trip than were I sloshing to a Ford Bronco’s elevated sway. I’ll think about that next time I’m tailgating a Porsche Cayenne doing 67 in the left lane.

(Speaking of which, the article doesn’t mention that Porsche makes an SUV.)

We do get around, finally, to the admission that driving safety is a matter of safe driving, no matter the car: “It depends on who’s behind the wheel.” Did we really have to go through all this SUV angst for that insight? I guess so. That same paragraph ends with, “The trouble with the S.U.V. ascendancy is that it excludes the really critical component of safety: the driver.”

Nice try. Going back to the beginning of the article we see the real problem. SUV isolation and its safety or non-safety is not the point: it is the driver, yes, only more specifically the type of driver, who is clearly not your typical New Yorker subscriber:

...market research concluded that S.U.V.s tend to be bought by people who are insecure, vain, self-centered, and self-absorbed, who are frequently nervous about their marriages and who lack confidence in their driving skills.

Here, my mind is driven to some report recently that more specifically reminds me of my second wife that chicks who get breast implants are more inclined to suicide than the general female populace (see Breast Implants Linked to Suicides). Let’s see, “insecure, vain, self-centered, self-absorbed....” Check. Check. Check. Check.... Yeah, that’s the one, implants and the SUV. Can’t we say the same for a sports car?

(And the boob job, four step-kids and two new dogs...)

What better demographic for the salesman? What, sell something to the insecure and at a serious premium? This guy thinks he’s hit upon some profound insight on marketing SUVs. No, Bubba, it’s marketing, and marketing any damned thing. Remove vanity and there goes 4/5ths of advertising. (Remove sex and there goes the rest.) Selective outrage is the diet of our New Yorker friend. Oh the waste of it all, with four wheel drive, elevated chassis, and big tires that never get beyond the occasional snow storm or the front lawn. And it’s an industry scam, like planned obsolescence: a Ford marketer is quoted, “The only time those S.U.V.s are going to be off-road is when they miss the driveway at 3 A.M.” Good line, but why don’t we scoff as well at buyers of the Porsche Boxter who will never use but a fraction of the car’s potential?

How does such misplaced cause and effect get into the New Yorker? Not even the trial attorneys argue that breast implants cause suicide -- not yet, anyway. Or is there something to it? Are suicidal chicks without breast implants less inclined to suicide? Do egotistical girls become more vain with implants? Do SUVs make bad drivers drive worse, and, if so, have we a Federal case?

Oh, hell, I can’t follow it anymore. All I know is that in this article the wish is the father to the thought.

The real story of the SUV is how government regulation created it and how the public loves it. After pushing Detroit into smaller and smaller (ah, yes, the downsized 1977 Cadillac!), the Government gave back by protecting domestic “trucks” with tariffs and quotas. Ford caught on by turning a truck, an F-150, into a car, and thusly was launched the SUV -- not a car, therefore exempt from EPA car rules, NHTSA car safety rules, and, best of all, exempt from foreign car competition. And, please, please let us not forget that the vain, insecure, egotistical small-car hating public loved it. For all the loathing of SUVs, what we really have here is ignorance of the causal effects of government regulation and hatred of consumer choice.

I still laugh when I see a 4x4 in a snow bank. To see that car cross-angled, halfway down the slope and those lonesome, foolish footsteps heading away warms the soul with that wonderful, satisfying enjoyment of someone else’s suffering. Our New Yorker writer doesn’t even enjoy that. The article ends with an empty, starved contempt: “Didn’t it seem like the safest vehicle in the world?”

Nah. Not me. I’ll enjoy my contempt for all its worth, and truly enjoy it. What good a good anger if it leaves you feeling robbed? I’ll laugh, and I won’t call for a legislative cure.

I will, though, whistle a little, “There but for the Grace of God, go I...”

- Bromley, Jan, 2004