High and Mighty: SUVs — the World's Most Dangerous Vehicles and How They Got That Way
By Keith Bradsher
Public Affairs Press, 2002
468 pages, $62 hb
BY PHIL SHANNON
Explorer, Patrol, Land Cruiser, Discovery, Range Rover, Jackaroo — the names say it all: a car for adventure, for taming the wild and, with their menacing appearance, for taming the other critters out there in the jungle that is modern-day urban traffic. "Mess with me and you die", announces the heavy, tall, petrol-guzzling, bullbar-toting four-wheel drive (or sports utility vehicle — SUV — as it is known in the US).
The rise of the SUV, from one in every 100 new cars sold in the US in 1982 to one in six today, is documented in motoring journalist Keith Bradsher's High and Mighty, which has been enthusiastically endorsed by consumers' rights advocate and US Green Party presidential candidate Ralph Nader.
Bradsher convincingly shows how these environment-mangling, global-warming, killing machines have become so dominant and dangerous, fuelling a "highway arms race" of bigger and more powerful SUVs.
The desire of the "Big Three" car manufacturers — General Motors, Ford and Daimler-Chrysler — for a new and highly profitable vehicle, their strategic control of a domestic SUV market sheltering behind a 25% tariff wall on imports, and regulatory inaction by US governments committed to protecting the profits of the car industry, have resulted in 20 million SUVs (10%, and rising, of the US car population) roaming America's cities, a long way from the places where a four-wheel drive is useful (only 1% of US owners use their SUV for off-road driving).
In the US, the SUV has long been exempted from safety, pollution and fuel economy regulations because car manufacturers, with a nod and a wink from Washington, have classified it as a light truck rather than a car. Regulations for cars are much stricter.
SUVs are allowed longer stopping distances and less durable tires. They are exempt from bumper height standards (making SUVs a significant danger to occupants in cars hit by them). There are no standards for the two main safety problems with SUVs — stability (proneness to rollover) and "crash compatibility" (damage caused to other vehicles in collisions).
The taller, heavier, stiff-frame SUVs — with their high front ends and minimal crumple zones — ensure that it is car occupants who die in SUV-car collisions. SUVs are safer for their occupants in crashes with cars but deadly to the "other guy". There are still no relevant "crash compatibility" safety tests which SUVs must pass before being allowed onto the market.
While SUV occupants are safer than car occupants in SUV-car collisions, there is an increased risk of a rollover — 62% of all SUV fatalities are from rollovers. Rollovers occur when vehicles are tripped or flipped over by striking another object, particularly fixed objects like guardrails. The SUV's high centre of gravity and off-road tyres make manoeuvrability and balance much more difficult in an emergency.
SUVs rollover at three times the rate of cars and were responsible for 12,000 US deaths during the 1990s. Rollovers are extremely dangerous — although they account for only 1% of crashes in the US, they produce 25% of all traffic deaths. They place tremendous strains on the occupants' neck and spine, and SUV rollovers account for 75% of all traffic accident paralysis cases.
Regulations to improve stability and to strengthen roofs to protect from rollover death and injury have been hotly opposed by the car manufacturers. Efforts by the government safety regulator, the National Highway Traffic Safety Authority, to set stability standards have been fought so successfully that all that remains is a requirement to place an rollover warning sticker on SUVs' sun visors and a SUV "rollover rating" (compromised by being based on only one occupant when a fully loaded SUV has an even higher centre of gravity and greater proneness to rollover).
SUVs are also harmful on the environmental front. SUVs and light trucks can emit 5.5 times more smog-causing gases than cars. They are required to average only 20.7 miles per gallon in the US compared with 27.5 mpg for cars. The Environmental Protection Authority does nothing about this, being under the control of a White House averse to tightening fuel economy measures for SUVs.
Alleged eco-friendly Democrats, like former president Bill Clinton, are just as culpable as the anti-regulation Republicans like George Bush. At his nomination in 1992, Clinton promised to raise light truck fuel economy standards; he immediately backed off once elected.
The SUV gas gluttons now use up an extra 280,000 barrels of fuel each day than they would if they were classed as cars and subject to car fuel economy standards. Watch out Alaska Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, here come the drilling rigs! Watch out Iraq, here come the marines!
The result for the car manufacturers of all this loving kindness from the government? Boomtime for share prices and executive salaries, and a return to the profit margin heydays of the 1960s. Ford was so flush from SUV profits (the Ford Explorer has been the top-selling SUV in the US every year since 1991) that it was able to buy Volvo in 1999 and the British Land Rover company in 2000.
There is mutual government and manufacturer joy over this outcome. Both share a commitment to "free enterprise", that is profit-making free from regulations which would force expenditure on safety and fuel efficiency standards thus cutting into sales and profits.
Governments ensure their (under-resourced) traffic safety regulators stay close to the car makers — there is often a traffic jam at the revolving door as senior regulators become executives at the companies they are supposed to regulate, and vice versa. As a lawyer for rollover victims said, "as long as big business runs the government of the United States, regulation is not going to be effective".
SUVs are bad news for planet Earth and its people. The US still accounts for two-thirds of the world's SUV sales, but the rest of the world is catching up. In Australia, four-wheel drives, with the Ford Explorer leading the way, now make up 13% of the new car market (close to the 17% of the US) and, like the US, Australia allows SUVs to emit more polluting gases than cars.
Bradsher conservatively estimates that, by substituting for cars, SUVs currently cause an excess 3000 deaths a year in the US — 1000 extra deaths from rollovers, 1000 more from occupants hit by SUVs and 1000 more from respiratory deaths from the extra smog caused by polluting gases emitted by SUVs. These are "3000 needless deaths a year in the United States — as many people annually as died in the terrorist attacks at the World Trade Center in New York on September 11, 2001".
No crusade is being waged by the Bush administration to avenge the victims of the car manufacturers' fanatical pursuit of profits. After all, the manufacture of unsafe products, deceptive and cynical marketing, the failure to act on known problems and government laxity on safety and environmental regulation — these are all part of capitalism and the sorry SUV saga is just another chapter in this system's human and environmental cost.
From Green Left Weekly, March 12, 2003.
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