One for all you SUV-haters out there

[robinturner]

<a href="http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2001/0212.mencimer.html>Bumper mentality</a> Before reading that article, I used to think guiltily that if I had ridiculous amounts of money, I would be seriously tempted to buy an SUV and damn the environment, simply because driving in Turkey is similar to a demolition Derby. Now we find that SUVs are actually more dangerous than ordinary cars. Mind you, I suppose I should be grateful to my aging VW Scirroco. Although I hate cars in general, and drive as little as I can, it has served us faithfully, emerging from fender benders with hardly a scratch while expensive new cars needed their stylish laminated fenders replaced, lost headlights and in one case even needed panel-beating. And when we had to get over the Taurus mountains in a snowstorm (pushing the car most of the way up and sliding most of the way down) we passed several SUVs buried in snowdrifts, as their owners got the real meaning of "going off-road".

Comments

[earthemp6.livejournal.com]

An informative article, thanks for posting the link. I have always been one of the people who believed that SUVs were safer because of their size. I was surprised by the fact that I have never considered the damage that they cause to other motorists. The statistics they mentioned were shocking.
The most chilling part?

One such woman confesses rather chillingly to Bradsher that her first response after killing another driver was to go out and get an even bigger SUV.
I wonder what the rationale behind that was? fear of death perhaps.