SUVs

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Vicious TNR article inspired by Keith Bradsher's book. Some tasty bits:

Eventually a federal bureaucrat decreed that an SUV with air conditioning, leather seats, and other suburban amenities becomes a truck if it is "capable of off-highway operation." The test of this, in turn, became whether the vehicle is tall enough to provide ground clearance. So Detroit made the early SUVs very tall, to be assured of the pollution-control exemption.

In the 1970s, as the rules of the Clean Air Act took force, federal mileage standards also went into effect. An asterisk in the rules specified that they did not apply to vehicles in excess of 6,000 pounds gross weight (vehicle weight plus maximum load). This asterisk was intended to keep the miles-per-gallon (MPG) rules for regular cars from affecting real trucks, since at the time there were no ordinary vehicles with a gross weight in excess of 6,000 pounds. But early SUV manufacturers realized that if they beefed up the suspensions of their products to reach the 6,000-pound mark, they could evade mileage restrictions.

The most recent comprehensive study of SUV performance and safety, published last July by the National Research Council (NRC), an affiliate of the National Academy of Sciences, found that occupant deaths were slightly higher in SUVs as a class than in cars as a class. [...] The NRC study found that large cars such as the Buick Riviera and mid-size models such as the Toyota Camry are notably safer for the people inside them than are SUVs. The study also found that the most dangerous vehicles for their occupants are compact and sub-compact cars ("econo-boxes" such as the Dodge Neon and other small vehicles) and, at the other end of the scale, pickups.

To prevent buyers from realizing how readily the Explorer could be packed over its safe weight, Bradsher writes, Ford did not list the safe load anywhere on the vehicle or even in the owner's manual. Instead the maximum gross weight--vehicle and load combined--was stamped inside the doorjamb. This number is completely useless unless you know what the SUV itself weighs. Preposterously, owner's manuals instructed buyers that they were to find some way to weigh the vehicle, then subtract that number from the gross weight to determine safe load. Bradsher spent a day in an Explorer driving around trying to find a truck scale that would weigh his ride; he is surely the only person ever to have done this.