Madam, - A front-page report in your edition of April 3rd highlighted the high level of greenhouse gas emissions from SUVs. To my amazement when this issue was discussed on RTÉ news that night a sales executive said people bought these cars for their "comfort, safety, style and road capacity".
Whatever about comfort and style being important sales factors, and the amount of road space they take up, it is not true that SUVs are safer.
A recent survey and publication by TCD Professor of Geriatrics Des O'Neill and colleagues found that elderly people hit by SUVs were far more likely to be fatally or seriously injured than by a regular car. This is because injuries from an SUV are higher up on the body, the legs usually being the body part most injured by a car.
Regarding passengers in a SUV, an American survey of injuries to child passengers found they were just as likely to be injured as in sedans - in fact more so, if the SUV rolled over, and SUVs roll over in crashes twice as often as sedans.
Because it is so difficult for an SUV driver to see small children, they are frequently involved in tragic "drive-way" accidents - in which a child is killed or injured outside the family home. For this reason too, a woman in Australia who ran over a five-year-old child who was so close to the car that she did not see her is, I am told, campaigning to have SUVs banned from areas near schools.
When I look at all of the young women driving children in SUVs in the area in which I live - Ballsbridge - with not a speck of mud on the cars' shining surfaces, I marvel at the power of sales executives in smart garages who have persuaded these women to part with large sums of money for gas-guzzling, polluting vehicles which do not contribute to their own or other people's safety on the roads. - Yours, etc,
Senator MARY HENRY, Seanad Éireann, Dublin 2.