Sport Utility Vehicles have conquered America. Europe is next. They shouldbe stopped, warns Keith Bradsher of the New York Times, because they're dirty and dangerous and they drink fuel.
Sport utility vehicles or four-wheel drive jeeps have taken over America's roads during the past decade, and are on their way to taking over the world's roads.
The four-wheel-drive vehicles offer a romantic vision of outdoor adventure to deskbound baby boomers. The larger models provide lots of room for families and their gear. Their size gives them an image of safety. This image is an illusion. They roll over too easily, they are dangerous to other road users and are a lethal threat to pedestrians.
Their "green" image is also a mirage, their gas-guzzling designs increase smog and the threat of global warming.
The manufacturers' market researchers have decided that millions of baby boomers want an adventurous image. The result has been unusually tall, menacing vehicles like the Dodge Durango, with its grille resembling a jungle cat's teeth and its flared fenders that look like bulging muscles in a savage jaw.
No motoring safety issue has ever captured attention in the US with such intensity as the many rollover crashes of Ford Explorer sport utility vehicles equipped with Firestone tyres that failed.
Ford and Firestone have been rightly condemned for cutting corners in the design and manufacturing of the Explorer and the tyres, and for doing little for several years as some of their employees learned of problems with the tyres.
The height and width of the typical SUV make it hard for car drivers behind it to see the road ahead, increasing the chance that they will be unable to avoid a crash, especially a multivehicle pile-up.
Most motorway guardrails were built for low-riding cars, and may flip an SUV on impact instead of deflecting it safely back into its lane of traffic. The trucklike brakes on SUVs mean that their stopping distances are longer.
And when SUVs do hit pedestrians, they strike them high on the body, inflicting worse injuries than cars, which have low bumpers that flip pedestrians onto the relatively soft bonnet.
The occupant death rate per million SUVs in the US is actually 6 per cent higher than the occupant death rate per million cars.
SUV occupants also face a higher risk of paralysis caused mainly by rollovers. While no national studies have been done in the US, statewide studies in Arkansas and Utah have found that rollovers account for nearly half of all cases of paralysis. Put another way, rollovers cause almost as many paralysing spinal injuries as all illnesses, falls and every other form of traffic accident.
The safety hazards of SUVs have been mitigated until now because they have mainly attracted the safest drivers. The principal buyers in the US of SUVs in the 1990s and early 2000s have been baby boomers in their 40s, with some sales to people in their 30s and 50s.
As affluent, cautious-driving baby boomers begin to sell or trade-in their SUVs, the used-vehicle market will be flooded with these vehicles. Falling prices will make them more attractive to younger drivers and drivers with poor safety records.
SUVs are terrible not just for traffic safety but for the environment. Because of their poor mileage, they emit a lot of carbon dioxide, a gas linked to global warming. A midsize SUV puts out roughly 50 per cent more carbon dioxide per mile than the typical car, while a full-size SUV may emit twice as much.
The Sierra Club likes to point out that driving a full-size SUV for a year instead of a midsize car burns as much extra energy as leaving a fridge door open for six years. SUVs also spew up to 5.5 times as much smog-causing gases per mile as cars.
Car manufacturers made surprising progress in the 1980s and 1990s in improving the fuel economy of cars, but these gains are being slowly erased by the rise of SUVs.
So how many people is the SUV boom already needlessly killing? My best estimate is that the replacement of cars with SUVs is currently causing close to 3,000 needless deaths a year in the United States. Roughly 1,000 extra deaths occur each year in SUVs that roll over, compared to the expected rollover death rate if these motorists had been driving cars.
About 1,000 more people die each year in cars hit by SUVs than would occur if the cars had been hit by other cars. And up to 1,000 additional people succumb each year to respiratory problems because of the extra smog caused by SUVs.
This conservative estimate excludes a lot of problems that are hard to calculate, such as SUVs' harm to pedestrians, or their contribution to global warming.
Government intervention in the car market, through safety and environmental regulations issued in the 1970s - and never adequately updated since then - has made matters worse. The SUV boom is to a considerable extent the result of a series of disastrous public policy mistakes that have encouraged manufacturers to build gas-guzzling, pollution-belching, unsafe SUVs instead of safe, clean, fuel-efficient cars.
From High and Mighty - SUVs: The World's Most Dangerous Vehicles and How They Got That Way by Keith Bradsher, former motoring editor of the New York Times and currently its Hong Kong bureau chief. Reprinted by arrangement with PublicAffairs, a member of the Perseus Books Group. All rights reserved