Take your SUV and SHUV it!

I can’t stand to hear it any more: “Now that we have kids we need to buy an SUV.” Some people are born gullible conformists and others just listen to too many “zoom-zoom” commercials on TV.

Face it, you’re not ever in this life going to be blasting across the arctic tundra or the Serengeti or fording some remote tributary of the Amazon in your leather upholstered Leviathan and if you were to try, you couldn’t do it in an overweight Lincoln Arrogator, Cadillac Exhibitionist, Lexus Bloatmaster or even a Hummjob H2. What you are going to be doing is driving a top-heavy, horrible handling, terrible braking, ladder-frame truck on the highway and often on tires that aren’t meant for that kind of service. You don’t need or want one to handle twisty mountain roads – you’re far safer in a car. You can’t legally drive in or even get to almost all the exotic places the ads suggest you can only get to in their magic sleds, much less can you avoid killing yourself in the process. Think you’re making a statement in your Ford Flatulator? You are – but not the statement you think you’re making.

A commercial encomium in last week’s Newsweek intimated that the Newest Hummer could stop faster than a car because it had anti-lock brakes. Such journalism is criminal as these brakes slightly increase stopping distance at the expense of steering control and do nothing to overcome the inherently bad stopping power of a heavy vehicle. That extra 4 or 5 car lengths the luxotruck needs to stop on the highway can mean someone’s life – maybe mine.

Physics are physics and high roll centers make for much less ability to handle quick maneuvers, even if Newton’s laws are “just a theory.” More weight dramatically lengthens stopping distance and reduces the ability to go around an obstacle. Four Wheel drive can make it much more difficult to recover from the spins that high roll centers bring. High centers of gravity and high ground clearance make it much more likely that the driver will lose control, flip over the tops of guard rails and into ditches. The sheer weight of these trucks in car’s clothing often causes roofs to collapse and break up, squashing the passengers. Ladder frame vehicles do not have energy absorbing crumple zones. Electronic gadgets and airbags don’t make up for the differences and all the advertising hyperbole won’t allow the best handling one of them to compete with the worst handling cars of 50 years ago.

SUVs and similar trucks get into more accidents and are 4 times more likely to kill someone than cars are. SUV back over 2400 children every year. Yes, the most important safety feature is the driver, but all too often, that driver is doing 95, talking on the phone, drinking coffee and dusting someone’s bumper on the Interstate. They feel safe – they’ve been told that they’re safe driving a truck, even if they haven’t got the experience and skills of a truck driver.

I see this nightmare repeated every few minutes when I take my weekly jaunt on the Florida Turnpike. I’m passed constantly by soccer moms and macho dads and witless teens pushing 95 or more in their trucks and every few weeks I see the results, strewn across medians, upside down in the ditch or being loaded onto flatbed wreckers.

Zoom Zoom to you too, ya moron.