# Interesting SUV article



## Guest (Dec 6, 2002)

TOM WALSH: SUVs unsafe at all times, author says

Builders and buyers are in for a bashing 
September 17, 2002

BY TOM WALSH 
DETROIT FREE PRESS COLUMNIST

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 [email protected], 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 [email protected] 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.

[email protected] 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.

Yep, even the cuddly Cruiser can be menacing in "High and Mighty."

Contact TOM WALSH at [email protected] or 313-223-4430.


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## Mr. The Edge (Dec 19, 2001)

Doesn't driving an Audi TT qualify the author himself as being insecure and vain?


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## ·clyde· (Dec 26, 2001)

TD said:


> *TOM WALSH: SUVs unsafe at all times, author says *


One of the major US auto mags (forget which) ripped _High and Mighty_ and Bradsher for being biased and the use of stereotypes (you could have substituted a number of us and our postings here and it would have read the same way ). Someone is going to give me the book later this month. Looking forward to reading it.


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## Guest (Dec 6, 2002)

*Re: Re: Interesting SUV article*



[email protected] said:


> *One of the major US auto mags (forget which) ripped High and Mighty and Bradsher for being biased and the use of stereotypes (you could have substituted a number of us and our postings here and it would have read the same way ). Someone is going to give me the book later this month. Looking forward to reading it. *


Yeah, I liked a few of the quotes too much for this to be really considered objective.


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## JST (Dec 19, 2001)

Bradsher is an idiot, and always has been. Few authors get my blood boiling faster. 

I'm no fan of SUVs, but the psycho-babble about the insecurities of their drivers is just stupid. The same could be said about BMW owners. The vast majority of people I know who buy SUVs buy them because they are big and those folk perceive (in my view, inaccurately) a need for the space. 

Hummer owners, on the other hand...


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## Plaz (Dec 19, 2001)

*Re: Re: Re: Interesting SUV article*



TD said:


> *Yeah, I liked a few of the quotes too much for this to be really considered objective. *


:lmao: Yeah, me too.

This one is my favorite:

"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."


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## ff (Dec 19, 2001)

I don't care much for SUV's either, but Bradsher lost all credibility when he lumped all SUV drivers into the same mentality/group. My wife drives one, and she isn't like what Bradsher describes at all. Quite the opposite, actually.

I suppose, given Bradsher's way of thinking, BMW owners are all supreme a-holes, and all pickup drivers are half ape (well, I guess that last one might be true  ). 

Oh well. I guess it's not worth rehashing this all over again.


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## Stuka (Jul 17, 2002)

*Re: Re: Interesting SUV article*



[email protected] said:


> *One of the major US auto mags (forget which) ripped High and Mighty and Bradsher for being biased and the use of stereotypes *


I am sorry, but I have long since stopped reading our home grown supposed car magazines like Rodent Track, C&D, Automobile (or is that SUV monthly). :thumbdwn:

Anyone of you who have not had a chance to read real magazines like Evo or Car should really check it out, you really are missing out.:thumbup: When one of these loser mags insisted on the U.S. M3 not having LC, and couldn't figure out how to launch SMG cars properly till this day, they lost all credibility with me. Let's not even go into the writting, testing, and the photograph quality between say, Evo and C&D. WSJ versus High school paper comes to mind.

This big support of SUV's just put the last nail on the coffin. Yeah, wanna know what I really think about SUV's?:flipoff: :flipoff: :flipoff:

Andy
02 M3 CB/Cloth SMG


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## LarryN (Dec 24, 2001)

TD said:


> *TOM WALSH: SUVs unsafe at all times, author says
> 
> BY TOM WALSH
> DETROIT FREE PRESS COLUMNIST
> *


2 Things about the article:

1.) Tom Walsh = Troll
2.) DETROIT FREE PRESS :lmao: :lmao: :lmao: :lmao:

2 Things about me:

1.) I own a SUV.
2.) I totally agree that too many people buy them for what they were not intended for.


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## Guest84 (Dec 21, 2001)

*Re: Re: Interesting SUV article*



LarryN said:


> *2 Things about the article:
> 
> 1.) Tom Walsh = Troll
> 2.) DETROIT FREE PRESS :lmao: :lmao: :lmao: :lmao:
> ...


:thumbup:

Ditto your post.


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## Eugie Baange (Sep 23, 2002)

Well, *I* laughed, anyway...
It *is* the Freep after all but I don't know...
I do think men who drive SUVs have issues with their masculinity... part of the whole manly "bigger-is-better" thing.
Can't cart the kiddies around in a minivan, that just looks to whipped but an SUV, especially if it has one of those step ladders on the side so you can climb in? AR! AR! AR!


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## Ausgang (Jan 4, 2002)

* (snip) . . . 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 *

Sigh. :tsk: Doesn't anyone who writes understand statistics?

Bradsher may be smarter than we think. He's using a formula that works for getting attention . . . and scientifically-minded focus on SUVs will not be favorable. He may say off the wall stuff, but so did Ralph N. in Unsafe at Any Speed and R. Carson in Silent Spring.

In the end, their views were accepted as helpful, if not totally accurate.

The whole 'SUV's are safer' thing is bull anyway. The only aspect that was favorable to SUVs was a momentum (weight) advantage in collisions with lighter vehicles. The same holds true for a dumptruck crashing into an SUV.


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## bmw325 (Dec 19, 2001)

I've read the book. What gets my blood boiling is all of the ill thought, negative reviews by "journalists" who clearly didn't read the book and just take a few quotes out of context. That famous quote about SUV drivers being insecure was actually a quote from a person who worked for an advertisting agency that advertises SUVs. Its amazing to see how many people have their heads in the sand about SUVs-- and just make unfounded, emotional attacks on a book that calls into question our obsession with big, dangerous, gas guzzling vehicles. The worst review I saw was the one in Automobile magazine by David E Davis Jr. That review was such a piece of trash-- and caused me to lose all respect for Mr. Davis. Please, read the book and not the reviews.

As far as safety, its pretty obvious-- the only advantage of SUVs as another poster said, is the ability to plow through lighter cars. But, this isn't even much of an advantage--SUVs that are built on ladder frames don't tend to have real crumples zones and transmit more force to their occupants. Bradsher has a great example of this in his book. He interviewed a guy who owns a Hummer H1, who was rear ended by a Mercedes. The woman in the Mercedes was relativly unscathed, but the guy in the Hummer still has some serious back problems-- the Hummer barely had a dent, the Mercedes was totalled-- but the reverse was true for the occupants.


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