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Picked up the Jan 12, 2004 "New Yorker" at the gym yesterday, for the cartoons, but read a piece called, "Big and Bad...How the SUV ran over automotive safety"
I'd call it required reading if you're a parent whose neighbors will accuse you of child neglect if you don't kit them out in a Jeep Grand Cherokee or (I'm not making this up) an H2 in their senior high school year and instead buy them an Audi 90 5 speed stick like I did for mine. "I'm concerned about my daughter's safety," they tell me.
Well, the author tackles this and other issues. Here's a short quote that won't get Scott in trouble with the copyright folks:
"The truth, underneath all the rationalizations, seemed to be that SUV buyers thought of big heavy vehicles as safe: they found comfort in being surrounded by so much rubber and steel. To the engineers, of course, that didn't make any sense either: if consumers really wanted something that was big and heavy and comforting, they ought to buy minivans, since minivans, with their unit-body constructin, did much better in accidents than SUVs (In a 35 mph crash test, for instance, the driver of a Cadillac Escalade...has a 16% chance of a life-threatening head injury, a 20% chance of life threatening chest injury, and a 35% chance of a head injury. The same numbers in a Ford Windstar, a vehicle engineered from the ground up, as opposed to simply being bolted onto a pickup truck frame, are respectively, 2%, 4%, and 1%."
Mostly, though, the author cites some entertaining examples (CA woman who needed SUV so she could drive over curbs and park on lawns at parties) and the sociological reasons why Americans have chosen passive safety (imagined chance of surviving wreck with semi-truck) versus active safety (ability to steer your way out of trouble, i.e, actually driving and avoiding truck.
This is probably stuff that most of us feel instinctively on this board. It's still worth checking out if your friends wonder why you love the idea of the night panel switch and awesome turbo response at highway speeds in the Saab better than the thought of watching DVD's or the video screen of a nav system on the I-5 while chatting on the cell phone.
Read and enjoy. Some of the cartoons are great, too.
Greg
posted by 68.193.67...
, Wed, 7 Jan 2004 05:59:23
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