ok... this is enough... time for my anti-SUV rant...
Why do Americans buy SUVs? Three reasons i've ever heard: 1) they're safer 2) they have lots of space 3) they look cool. Personally I don't feel 3) warrants a response as far as responsibility to the earth and fellow beings is concerned... so i'll deal with 1, mostly... Safety-wise, an SUV's driver is more likely to survive a two-car collision, true, but the driver of the other car (when it's not an SUV) is much more likely to be killed, as is true of a pedestrian hit by an SUV (because of the high fender, they crush other cars and people underneath, whereas, for example, as you see in the movies, a person hit by a normal car rolls over the hood). In addition SUVs are about 2x as likely to be in one-car accidents (rollovers, hitting a tree, deer, etc.) because of their inherent instability and difficulty of control. In addition, Consumer Reports ran their usual 5-mph-backwards-into-a-wall test on SUVs and they were surprised to discover that the backs were crushed (thousands of dollars of repairs) where normal cars they ran the tests on simply had a few dents and superficial paint scrapes (a few hundred dollars max). So on top of the repair costs, presumably these collisions would also be more dangerous to rear passengers (especially since, there being no real trunk, the passengers are nearer to the back of the car anyways). So much for safety. As far as space, every Dodge Grand Caravan i've ever seen has more space...
Also, (as i'm sure you know) gas mileage is terrible, as are emissions levels. In fact, many if not most violate US emissions regulations; but the carmakers get out through loopholes in the law. And who's going to crack down... George Bush? Hah! The fact is, it wouldn't be hard for them to make more efficient cars and SUVs, but why should they bother? The fact is the current SUVs sell better than any electric or hybrid car out there, so it doesn't pay for them to design a new ecologically sound product no one will buy. In fact, this points out the biggest SUV problem: Mass-scale domino effect. 3 examples: 1) people feel uncomfortable on the road with large SUVs so they buy an SUV to feel safer, leading to a big ugly loop of more and more people buying them, 2) more people buy SUVs so carmakers don't bother with fuel efficient cars, so there are more inefficient models that people have to choose from every year, leading to even more being bought (yet another loop); 3) really fuel-efficient cars (for example, supercompacts from Europe (of course, where else?)) are banned from American roads because of increased safety standards because of - you guessed it - SUVs and other cars that would crush them. Of course, if you look at 1 and 2, even if they were allowed, no carmaker would bother releasing them here, and no one would buy them. And this all started with individuals thinking they could benefit using a car designed for safaris and offroading to drive to work in the morning.
But whatever. Who cares if they're unsafe gas-guzzling pollutant-spitting deathboxes? They look cool, right?
(sorry, i feel pretty strongly about this one, in case you can't tell :-))
California has taken a step in the right direction with new legislation limiting auto emissions - and since no carmaker wants to make a different model to sell in CA, every carmaker would pretty much limit themselves to CA's laws... For chist's sake, they limit how much water newly-installed toilets can use nowadays (and it's not a lot)... why do we leave an even-more non-renewable resource (gasoline) unregulated to this extent, especially when there's pollution to worry about too? You wanna know? President Bush's spokesperson (Ari Fleischer, god i hate him...): "Mr. Bush believes that energy use is a reflection of the strength of our economy" and "the American way of life is a blessed one and we have a bounty of resources in this country." And this went pretty much unchallenged when we opened the emergency oil reserves last year to keep gas prices down. Almost makes me wanna run away and join some communist Sierra Club revolt. Or just vote for an ecologically motivated candidate for president... or Al Gore, because there's no way for 3rd partiers to get in the white house... of course, that's a matter for another rant on why we should run elections like Italy does... ah well.
