High and Nighty by Keith Bradsher
McCarraher, Eugene
SIZE NATTERS High and Nighty SUVs: The World's Most Dangerous Vehicles and How They Got That Way Keith Bradsher Public Affairs. Btvkf, $28.468 pp. Eugene NcCarraher nf Dante were to visit...
...SUV drivers subscribe to what one industry executive calls "preparedness chic": life is a Hobbesian war, best conducted with cell phones and gourmet provisions...
...Because SUVs obliterate other cars in collisions, American drivers pay "a huge bill in blood...for the fashion tastes of the nation's more affluent families...
...And given the new Congress, I wouldn't hold my (ever more polluted) breath about regulatory reform...
...Thus, because the SUV is so crucial to the economic health, not only of the auto industry, but of the larger corporate economy, politicians and bureaucrats are reluctant to subject it (and other light trucks) to stringent safety and fuel-economy standards...
...In all its subsequent incarnations-from the Wag-oneer and Cherokee to the Explorer and the Expedition-the SUV has been an automotive marker for baby boomers "sensitive" to the environment but determined to advertise their privileges...
...Obsessed with sedans, they continue to ignore the human and ecological threat posed by the SUV...
...A journalist rather than a poet, Keith Bradsher could be Dante's Virgil...
...If you think environmentalists are stalwart defenders of the earth against capitalist greed, Bradsher's book will come as a surprise...
...As a result, au-toworkers unions see it as a way to keep high-paying jobs for their members...
...Through the 1970s, the high price of gasoline and the competing chic of smaller cars inhibited the growth of the SUV market, but the return of cheap oil in the Reagan years, together with the strictness of fuel economy standards for cars (SUVs count as light trucks) made the SUV an especially attractive accoutrement...
...and if their owners want to complain about the infringement of their freedom, let them exercise it someplace where the rest of us won't be inconvenienced or annihilated...
...Its fuel efficiency is nonexistent...
...As a simple recourse to economic data would demonstrate, that old economy of material production remains very much with us...
...its ecological effect is despoiling...
...Reminiscent of Ralph Nader's Unsafe at Any Speed (1965), it fuses reportage and advocacy in a powerful brief against the auto industry's latest assault on life and limb...
...He traces the history of the SUV back to the 1930s, when Chevrolet produced a "Carryall Suburban" which could double as a passenger vehicle and light delivery truck...
...If they're "off-road" vehicles, then get them off the road...
...its safety is largely (and tragically) mythical...
...As one auto executive told Bradsher, the main culprits in the victory of the SUV were affluent consumers "who don't want to drive small cars with four-cylinder engines...
...While death rates in collisions among SUV drivers are below average, they are higher in accidents overall, mostly thanks to rollovers...
...nervous about their marriages and uncomfortable about parenthood...
...SUV occupants simply die differently," as Bradsher puts it drolly...
...In fact, the Bush administration's economic-stimulus plan includes increased deductions for small businesses that purchase SUVs...
...Clotaire Rapaille, a French anthropologist turned market researcher, summarizes the SUV mentality: "I'm going to be on the battlefield a long time, so on the outside I want to be menacing but inside I want to be warm, with food and hot coffee and communications...
...With macabre prescience, it proved to be popular among undertakers for transporting coffins and flower arrangements...
...As Bradsher puts it, perhaps a bit too harshly, "mechanical engineering has appealed less to environmentalists than paddling around among endangered whales and coral reefs...
...General Motors and Ford, Bradsher reminds us, have greater sales than Microsoft, IBM, and AT&T combined, and their consolidated annual revenue dwarfs the Pentagon budget...
...Charon would ferry his unfortunate cargo in a Ford Expedition, through a showroom canopied by an ominous sign: "Abandon all hope, ye who purchase here...
...In the end, there isn't much Bradsher can suggest to halt or decelerate the highway arms race...
...Former Detroit bureau chief for the New York Times, Bradsher has written a damning report on the SUV...
...American Motors' Kaiser Jeep division cultivated an enormous market among upscale urbanites who both warmed to the martial and utilitarian image of Jeeps and longed to emulate "the automotive fashions of the horses-and-hunting set...
...and, above all, "self-centered and self-absorbed, with little interest in their neighbors or communiJ. Dl CHIARRO ties...
...In addition to explaining the importance of SUVs to the corporate political economy, Bradsher enlightens about its deadly technical absurdities...
...Indeed, Bradsher's discussion provides a long overdue antidote to the hype surrounding "the new economy...
...I imagine Dante being chauffeured through the inferno of contemporary driving in Virgil's sensible station wagon...
...To provide the off-road traction that suburban adventurers don't require, stopping distances have been lengthened-hence, the SUV's mediocre brakes and poor handling...
...Although Time has dubbed the SUV a "macho-chic machine," Bradsher shows that it has been much more prominent as a vehicular idiom of class...
...They paid for auto-industry support in their crusade to protect the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge by backing away from stricter SUV regulations which, arguably, would have done more to safeguard Alaskan wildlife by reducing demand for fossil fuel...
...Like a good liberal, he looks to enlightened corporate policy, better design and engineering, and tougher government regulation of emissions and fuel economy...
...The appeal to designers and engineers sounds like a technological fix to a cultural and political problem...
...With a truckload of data, interviews, and history, Bradsher argues a simple thesis: that the SUV is the worst form of vehicular transportation ever devised...
...Manufactured by an unlikely coalition of industry leaders, union officials, politicians, and environmentalists, and propelled by the fantasies of deskbound suburbanites, the sport-utility complex has fostered "a highway arms race," in Brad-sher's words, with little but the prospect of escalation in sight...
...Crash-test scores are "horrific...
...and its social impact is nefarious...
...Eugene NcCarraher nf Dante were to visit America today, would he add a special circle in hell for the drivers of sport-utility vehicles (SUVs...
...The SUV is easily produced and enormously profitable...
...The auto industry's own market research reveals that SUV owners tend to be "insecure and vain...
...The engineers he interviewed spoke with remarkable candor about the defects of SUVs, and all agreed that, for family needs, they are "poor substitutes for cars...
...Bradsher never considers more draconian but reasonable solutions: taxing SUVs exorbitantly, mandating special and very expensive licenses, or-ideally- banning them from streets and highways altogether...
...Of all his dramatis personae, environmentalists come off as especially inattentive and short-sighted...
...Four-wheel drive, we learn, is unnecessary, practically useless, and even dangerous...
...He also chronicles the evolution of the Jeep from military to "family" use after World War II...
...I'm not sure what "enlightened" executives would do, other than emit more rhetorical smoke about how "green" their companies really are...
Vol. 130 • March 2003 • No. 6
