That air that you breathe? That water that you drink? Those roads on which you want to be safe, that polar ice cap you don’t want melting and flooding your home, that world at peace? You liked those things, didn’t you? Well, FUCK YOU! They’re mine, and I will destroy them.

Fuck-You Vechicles (FUVs)

What’s going on here? Why are these horrible lumbering beasts so popular? The advertisers claim that buying an SUV will make your family safer, your country stronger, your penis bigger. But these are all fairly transparent lies. SUVs make roads, highways, our air and water, our economy, third-world countries, and the world significantly more dangerous. They are overpriced, difficult to use effectively, unpleasant at highway speeds, and expensive to operate. Whether they do in fact make your penis bigger is left as an exercise to the reader (suggested equipment: a rope and a few pulleys).

I really like air. I love the smell of pine trees, the crystal-clear skies that let me see mountains miles off as if they were right in front of me, and the sheer joy of inhaling! Burning gasoline doesn’t really contribute much to any of that. Bicycle Almanac claims that "Car emissions kill 30,000 people [...] per year in the US", which suggests how important it is to reduce emissions (and that’s just deaths. Remember how many non-fatal respiratory ailments will be due to car emissions). This country doesn’t have the moral fiber to move away from a car-based culture. Therefore good mileage must be encouraged. Aggressively.

There are plenty of other reasons to like good mileage. Like (in the US and most other countries) the desire for an economy that is not completely dependent on the whims of foreign nations. Or not wanting to needlessly burn through a more or less non-renewable resource. Global warming, anyone? And so on…

Surely destroying our atmosphere and destabilising the economies of fundamentalist countries fall under the category of safety, but how about the more immediate safety issues, like accidents? It turns out that SUVs can be safer than cars in a few rare cases, but in general they are more dangerous not only to their victims but also to their occupants. The Quick Version from Lawrence Berkeley National Labs.

Two issues stand out. Rollover is one issue. Pickups and SUVs are involved in a higher percentage of rollovers than passenger cars—the rate of fatal rollovers for pickups is twice that for passenger cars and the rate for SUVs is almost three times the passenger car rate. Overall, rollover affects about three percent of passenger vehicles involved in crashes but accounts for 32 percent of passenger vehicle occupant fatalities. Single vehicle rollover crashes accounted for 8,400 fatalities in 2001. Rollover crashes involving more than one vehicle accounted for another 1,700 fatalities, bringing the total fatality count to more than 10,000.

While light trucks represent 36 percent of all registered vehicles, they are already involved in about half of all fatal two-vehicle crashes with passenger cars. In these crashes, over 80 percent of the resulting fatalities are to occupants of the passenger cars. This problem will continue to grow as the percentage of light trucks in the fleet increases. SUVs account for about 35 percent of light truck sales.

Source: Jeffrey W. Runge, M.D. (2003)

SUVs, descendents of light trucks, are not subject to the same safety standards that apply to cars. Light trucks were originally mostly used on farms, for lugging stuff around, hauling treestumps out of the ground, and such, so it was reasonable to assume that they would only rarely drive on public roads, and they’d go slowly even then. So why make them as safe as real passenger cars? Unfortunately, the lawmakers forgot to make those reasonable assumptions into law.

When a car was struck in the side by an LTV, the fatality was 20.8 times more likely to have been in the passenger car. In a head-on collision between a car and an LTV, the fatality was 3.3 times more likely to be among car occupants.

Source: Robert Longley

Why are they dangerous to others? Partly due to weight, partly to all-too-common “offroad” (read “farm-grade”) suspension, partly due to increased emissions, but mostly thanks to ground clearance.

It should be obvious that they’re more dangerous than cars to other road users. Part of it is simply that they’re heavier. At the same speed, they have more kinetic energy, and therefore more capacity to inflict damage wherever they hit.

A surprising number of SUVs have obsolete suspension designs, and most have very soft springs. There is a sort of synergy between this and the high center of gravity: not only do SUVs carry weight in a location where it is difficult to control, but they tend to do an unusually poor job of controlling it. A handful of modern SUVs (mostly smaller ones) have better suspensions, and it helps a great deal, but not nearly enough. More on this later.

Where does that energy go in a collision? Into the participants’ contact points. Cars, being regulated, have bumpers at a standard height, which means that it’s easy to design for a collision with another car. But what about that ground clearance? An SUV’s bumpers are unregulated (farm use only, remember?) and will hit at a much less well-controlled height, often at car window level. Which do you think absorbs energy better: steel I-beams, glass, or human heads? Do you see why I think it’s important that road users agree about where the energy of a collision should be delivered? Not only do SUVs deliver more energy in a collision, but they have more lethal aim.

Thanks again to ground clearance, SUVs’ headlights are higher than those of cars. The DOT specifies that headlights must angle downward at a certain angle, meaning that two cars facing each other on a level road will never shine low beams into each others’ faces. But SUVs have much higher lights, and will often shine full-brightness headlights into the eyes of oncoming drivers. It’s hard to drive under these conditions.

Race cars are low to the ground. How low? As low as possible. The suspension will be very tight, to control roll and pitch. These things help the driver to control the vehicle. Compare this with SUVs, which are a long way up, and which generally have that traditional farm-grade suspension. And high-profile tires to boot! You won’t be able to corner very fast. So what? You’re not a race car driver. But in an emergency, when you have to dodge a random lifeform-in-the-road, no amount of skill can completely make up for poor equipment.

SUV drivers’ attitudes to safety, if they have them, must be along the lines of “In a collision, ideally I live and the other guy dies.” Making the roads more dangerous for everyone else isn’t actually going to make you safer (see below), but even if it did, that would be a pretty shitty attitude.

As a cyclist, I’m especially conscious of these issues. In a car, your chances against an SUV are much worse than your chances against another car. In a bike, you’re at a still bigger disadvantage.

Bicycle collisions with automobiles (odds: 1 in 113) are more than twice as survivable as collisions with pickups, SUV’s, and vans (odds: 1 in 47) which are three times more survivable than collisions with trucks (odds: 1 in 14).

Source: Ken Kifer: Is Cycling Dangerous?

The reason here is not weight, but hood height. And of course, an SUV is less likely to be able to avoid a collision than a car is. All cyclists should be actively campaigning against SUVs, which makes it all the stranger that in Boulder so many self-styled “cyclists” drive SUVs. Too frequently they use their SUVs to take their bikes for a ride; bikes aren’t transportation—they’re toys.

Aren’t they safer for their occupants, at least? In two-vehicle collisions, the heavier vehicle has an edge, and that means that SUVs will generally give more damage than they take (unless they roll…). But SUVs fare much worse than cars do in the far more common single-vehicle accidents. Modern car designers have made their designs remarkably safe, offering much better protection than SUVs—especially if you normalise by price!!

Sport utility vehicles have the highest rate of deaths occurring in rollovers. Cars such as the Ford Explorer, Toyota 4 Runner, Isuzu Rodeo, and Honda Passport have been involved in SUV rollovers that have ended up in serious injuries and death. SUV rollovers are almost three times more likely to occur than the average passenger car, and government tests indicate the most stable SUV is still more unstable than the most unstable car.

Source: SUV Rollover News

As a Boulderite, I go skiing when I can. As I drive up I70 on a snowy morning, I see a few Audis and Subarus in the ditch, their owners shovelling them out so they can get back on the road. And I see a few 4Runners and Explorers off the road, their owners admiring their undercarriages. Why? Ground clearance. Useful stuff for working on a farm, but highways seldom have 9-inch rocks on them. A car that will be going fast on the highway needs a low center of gravity. This is especially crucial for cars that will be driven in the snow: when you hit ice and start going a little sideways, and then hit dry pavement or a snowbank, you would like slide sideways instead of rolling. However, simply swerving to avoid an obstacle in the road can lead to SUV rollover. It sounds obvious, but surprisingly few Boulderites seem to understand this. They probably went to CU. Go figure.

Only slighly more subtle is what braking does to the car’s balance: the higher your center of gravity, the more weight will be transferred to the front tires during braking, and the more you will suffer from sudden, extreme oversteer. Here is a brief summary of a study on this subject.

I got a ride with a girl in her Bronco recently (ironically, it was to a wilderness restoration volunteer event). It was snowing. She actually believed that the 4WD on her truck made it safer in the snow than 2WD would have been. Why is this belief so common? 4WD helps you to accelerate, and there are a few possible accident scenarios in which the ability to accelerate fast might let you scoot to safety. But very few. The vast majority of dangerous road situations demand that you be able to swerve and brake effectively, and the best 4WD system in the world won’t help with either of those. Indeed, many 4WD systems as sold on trucks will hurt your ability to swerve: a locking center differential will constrain the front and rear axles to turn at the same speed. That’s fine for accelerating in very slippery conditions, but if you go around a turn, the front tires travel further than the rears (this is what a center differential takes care of for you). If the center diff is locked, it actually forces tires with traction to break traction and skid. Any 4WD system that is “not to be used on dry pavement at high speed” suffers from this defect.

By the way, even today, many manufacturers’ SUV drivetrains are designed this way, although we’ve known how to solve it for ages. You will get much better snow handling in an Audi/Volkswagen (perhaps the best AWD systems made), or in the AWD systems made by Subaru, Volvo, Saab, etc… In deep mud at low speeds, you will be better off with a manually-locking center diff such as many SUVs have, so if you’re buying a work vehicle for the farm, go for it.

Incidentally, the roof of any SUV is more annoying than that of any car if you want to load it up with kayaks, bikes, a roof box, etc… of course, pickup trucks are better for bikes (but not for any but the shortest river kayaks). And pickups suffer from many of the other problems of SUVs, in addition to being truly horrendous on snowy roads (hint: oversteer).

In summary, besides being sociopathic, SUVs compromise a great deal for the sake of being what they are. They are marketed as superior to cars in several respects that should well appeal to consumers, but the marketing is simply wrong. Therefore, most of the reasons people cite for getting an SUV are not valid—even the non-altruistic attributes they seek are better served by a car than an SUV.

So, if you’re going to get a vehicle, think hard about your priorities, and how your needs are best served. Occasionally, an SUV is a very good choice. But for most of us, the statement an SUV makes falls somewhere between “I have more money than brains” and “I’m a selfish turd.”

Links

FUH2.com Links

FUH2 does a much better job than I could hope to of maintaining a good list of relevant links.