Posted on 09/17/2002 11:36:33 AM PDT by Tumbleweed_Connection
Detroit's top auto executives, plus legions of Explorer, Grand Cherokee, Durango, Navigator and Tahoe owners, will be squirming -- and probably fuming -- over publication today of a provocative book, "High and Mighty: SUVs, the World's Most Dangerous Vehicles and How They Got That Way."
This book assaults sport-utility vehicles with a gusto recalling Ralph Nader's 1965 broadside against the Corvair in "Unsafe at Any Speed."
Written by New York Times correspondent Keith Bradsher, "High and Mighty" (Public Affairs, $28) bashes auto companies, auto buyers, the government and even Sierra Club tree huggers for the sport-utility vehicle craze that Bradsher claims is killing thousands of people and wrecking the environment.
Do you drive an SUV?
If so, don't read the next quote with food in your mouth. Here's what Bradsher writes about SUV buyers:
"They tend to be people who are insecure and vain. They are frequently nervous about their marriages and uncomfortable about parenthood. They often lack confidence in their driving skills. Above all, they are apt to be self-centered and self-absorbed, with little interest in their neighbors or communities."
Bradsher's favorite word to describe SUVs is "menacing," which he uses nine times in one five-page passage discussing the kill-or-be-killed psychology of SUV drivers. (The Free Press will run excerpts from the "Reptile Dreams" chapter of the book Thursday in the Motor City section.)
Bradsher was Detroit bureau chief for the Times from 1996 to 2001; he now runs the paper's Hong Kong bureau. He'll be in Detroit next week doing media interviews, as part of a national book promotion tour that includes stops in New York, Washington, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle.
"We're only at the beginning of the SUV problem," Bradsher told me from Hong Kong in a phone interview Monday, predicting that deaths and injuries will multiply as older-model used SUVs are purchased and driven by teenagers.
In the book's introduction, Bradsher spells out his premise, branding SUVs as gas guzzlers that "roll over too easily, killing and injuring occupants at an alarming rate, and are dangerous to other road users, inflicting catastrophic damage to cars that they hit and posing a lethal threat to pedestrians."
Don't expect top-level executives of General Motors Corp., Ford Motor Co. or DaimlerChrysler AG to be debating Bradsher in public. They don't want to give the book extra attention; and they sniff privately that it's mostly a rehash of articles that ran in the Times several years ago, which Bradsher disputes.
But that doesn't mean the auto industry will sit mutely and not contest the book's chief claims that SUVs have high rollover rates and inflict more death and mayhem in crashes than other vehicles.
The Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, the industry trade group, has hired Strat@comm, a public affairs firm with Detroit and Washington offices, to marshal data and arguments for rebuttal of "High and Mighty" claims regarding crash data, fuel economy and other issues. Key officials of Strat@comm include Diane Steed, former administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, and Jason Vines, former communications vice president for Ford during the brouhaha over Ford Explorers and Firestone tire failures.
Strat@comm has created a 15-page document titled "SUV Allegations and Facts" that is a point-by-point attack on Bradsher's book. And the firm will happily refer journalists to an even more detailed 70-page compilation of responses to what it considers common myths and off-base claims about SUVs.
Provocative point of view So what should an average book reader, or vehicle buyer, make of "High and Mighty" and the inevitable cries of foul from the auto industry?
First, in the interest of full disclosure, it should be noted that my family vehicles are a 2002 Jeep Grand Cherokee, a 2000 Ford Taurus and a 1996 Eagle Vision. If that makes me insecure and vain when I'm behind the wheel of the Jeep and sensible when driving the Taurus, well, I don't take the psycho-profiling personally. (For the record, Bradsher and his family drove a 2002 Audi TT and a 1999 Mercury Sable before leaving Detroit earlier this year.)
Bradsher's book is a full-tilt polemic, in the vein of Nader's "Unsafe at Any Speed," to which it will inevitably be compared. It takes a provocative point of view and argues it passionately.
Is it persuasive? Sometimes. There's little question that SUVs are more prone to roll over than most cars and vans. And the safety implications of design incompatibility -- big vehicles with high bumpers smashing into low-riding cars -- should be debated and studied.
That said, Bradsher faces a daunting task to convince the public that SUVs are a huge menace to society, when in fact, the overall rate of U.S. highway deaths has dropped by 50 percent since the mid-1980s, even as sales of SUVs jumped by 600 percent.
And Bradsher, in his zeal to demonize the SUV, may turn off even his most supportive audiences by insulting them.
It's no surprise that he would trash a big SUV like Cadillac Escalade as having the "ride quality of a pig on stilts." Or even that he would belittle the Detroit automotive media as hometown cheerleaders, "dominated by a small contingent of reporters who have been covering the industry for decades and often share the industry's hostility toward any criticism of automobiles."
But Bradsher also charges that NHTSA, the federal safety agency, was "asleep" on the Ford-Firestone case.
And he even jabs environmentalists, the most likely support group for "High and Mighty," charging that they've been slow to criticize SUVs. "Mechanical engineering has appealed less to environmentalists than paddling around among endangered whales and coral reefs, or planting trees in deforested regions of the Himalayas," he writes.
Vines, the former Ford PR chief, complains that Bradsher has crossed over from journalist to advocate, and reverted to name-calling because his premise about SUV dangers is unsound.
I figure if Bradsher wants to write a book, he ought to have a point of view and not pussyfoot around with it. And if the barbs sting a bit, that's OK -- Detroit can handle a little spirited sniping.
But it's a bit much, even for me, to read that Chrysler executives wanted to use tinted rear windows to give a "more menacing image" to the PT Cruiser.
Guess if you are tooling around in an urban area SUV's might be a bit unnecessary but when you live where the snow might reach a foot high in no time and the deer are running all year long.......
Gee, I'd hate to hear what you think about most Black people, or most Christians, or most...
Well, I live in a suburban setting, and mine works for me just fine. I am 6'5", and have had enough years of too little headroom and legroom. I also have chronic back problems, and it is a lot easier for me to step up up and in than to crawl down into a standard car, which for me is rather like a Mercury astronaut crawling into his space capsule.
Also, my Explorer has a small pickup bed (it's actually a SUV/Truck), so if I need to take my lawn mower in to the shop, or pick up some plants at the nursery, or buy a ladder at Home Depot, I can do so whenever I want. Try fitting that stuff in a standard car!
I don't know any jackasses that own SUVs, though there are almost certainly some out there. Of course, one can generalize the drivers who are jackasses as SUV Owners, women, minorities, foreigners, people on the phone, people eating, or whatever. If a guy cuts you off in a SUV, does it annoy tou more than if he's driving a Jetta? What if he's driving a Jag, or a BMW-then he's a rich jackass whou cut you off! I prefer to think that the drivers who drive like jackasses do so regardless of their vehicle.
Is there a single thing you do in this world that you enjoy? If so, why?
The next accident was 100% my fault. I was behind a car turning left at a green light. The oncoming traffic was heavy and he wasnt going to be going anywhere for a while. I decided to go around him, and without looking pulled around him into the other lane. BAM! I nailed a car in the drivers side door, pushed it off the road and onto the sidewalk, blew out all 4 of his tires and the front end of my Ram Charger was halfway into the drivers area. I started thinking "I wrecked my truck, I wrecked my truck." I got out and the guy got out the passenger side of his car and said "well, lets get em apart and look at the damage." I put it in reverse and backed out of his car. I got out and saw his car was totalled. I then looked at mine and I didnt so much as have paint on my bumper!
He looked at me and said, "well, this car was a piece of shit but I just put on 4 new tires. How about you pay me for the tires." I said ok! Gave him my contact info and i NEVER heard from him.
My truck was quickly nicknamed "The Tank"
The one time I know my car was hit in a parking lot it was hit by a buick! And you know how I know this? Because I was sitting in my car. Then the asshole started driving away and only stopped when he saw me get out of my car.
Accidents happen. What do you want to be driving when it happens?
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