NOT BUYING IT.

People want SUVs because they are marketed the most aggressively and because of the perceived safety issue. The latter is significant among people that I know. Nobody wants to be riding in a Smart car when a Tank Nazi–er, SUV driver–plows into them while talking on mobile phone two or three feet above one’s head.

To encourage a market for small cars, we should impose size/weight limits on the behemoths, not just fuel economy rules. Restricting roof heights would improve situational awareness among tank drivers by bringing them down closer to the rest of us. Restricting bumper heights to the normal passenger car standard would reduce the incidence of the particularly destructive accidents where the large vehicle rides up over the smaller.

We should also make liability proportional to the damage that one’s vehicle can inflict, regardless of who is at fault for the accident. Higher insurance rates would increase the dollar cost of tanks to something closer to their real-world cost to society. An SUV is a dangerous nuisance, like a swimming pool, and the laws should recognize that.

We might also consider other, non-safety-related limits, such as imposing parking constraints and restricting the use of high-profile, high-drag SUVs on interstate highways.

Get rid of the safety issue and alter the marketing, and I see no reason why Americans will want to keep the SUVs. SUVs are trucks, with the same awful ride and bad handling as the pickups they are based on. Even the Porsche Cayenne a colleague bought was, at best, a nice riding, nice-handling truck. Trucks are simply nowhere near as comfortable and quiet as real cars. Only the Porsche came anywhere close to the comfort and practicality of our humble Prius.

(Connery is class, true class, by my lights, and his use of the mother tongue, is superb …)

Aja has discovered (just yesterday), doing her own research, that upwards of one hundred million animals are used for ‘testing’ each year. She is very unhappy about this fact.

Henceforth my ‘measure’ of speed shall be, “Fast as a speeding Ingraine!”.

Thanx for the pix (AND for who you are and what you do), SD.

DW

If any man were marooned on an island with Susan Boyle, she would become a love object within 6 months. Guaranteed.

Same principle.

Are you some blah, gray-porridge type, some retiring wallflower?

No! You are vrooom! Or even vrooom, vrooom! You are Corvette! Or, perhaps a stretch SUV from, oh, say BMW or Cadillac … you are most definitely not a nimble handling, well-packaged, excellent mileage-per-gallon people-box.

(Of course you might be appalled to learn “what” those anti-social types who ride around on motorcycles think you are).

Okay, that was all, or mostly all, snark. But I do have to tell you that the discussion going on ‘today’ went on yesterday and the day before that … “We need big, heavy cars to stay on the road, they are safer and more comfortable, them furrin cars are death traps and a semi would reduce ‘em to rust-colored stains on the highway.” [This was a few years before the first ‘compact’ cars were introduced to Americans … and the image of Volkswagens, Volvo 544’s, and sports cars ranging from MGs to Jaguars (although their MkVII sedan was huge and heavy, it also handled very well) to Austin Healeys floating dangerously away into the sky with their hapless and silly victims struggling to extricate themselves from their effete and ungrounded ‘pretenses’ has remained with me,suggesting a ‘reversed’ shift of the ‘Rapture’, perhaps?] How ‘high’ is your center of ‘gravity’? Remember, the ‘higher’ it is, the more likely you are to ‘roll-over’ … (or be rolled-over).

I think phred’s comment @ 37 speaks BIG to the reality of ‘manipulated’ automotive desire, as opposed to a more-simple sense of essential utility. And, though this next ‘notion’ which I propose to share with you will, doubtless, be received with something less than enthusiasm, Aston Martin and (the far lesser known)Bristol automobile companies both endorse the idea of ‘lifetime’ cars. Question: Why are automobiles not engineered to be up-datable, with ‘modular’ drive-train elements and design concepts that are not simply ‘fashion’ statements? Who actually believes that the rate of automotive ‘development’ is such that yearly ‘updates’ are anything more than ‘gloss’ and matters of perceived ‘comfort’ rather than substantive advances in engineering or materials? At some point, it must be realized that the ‘cost’ of the ‘new’ and the ‘cost’ of dealing (or NOT dealing) with the ‘old’ of whatever technology we care to speak of, will become unsupportable either due to the cost of such things as lithium for batteries, or the simple inability of many to ‘afford’ to play the ‘game’. Not to mention the amount of traffic we would have to contend with should everyone, everywhere be ‘driven’ to drive. (Confession time: I love fine cars, I love to drive, I love the ‘freedom’, and that sense of the ‘open road’ stretching in sinuous curves or compelling straights before my ’steed’ … I am vrooom, vrooom, vrooom!)

Remember the ‘wedge’ shapes that were so ‘in’ for a time? Bloody awful, most of them. Aerodynamic consideration, if ‘done’ properly, often creates timeless beauty … (does my prejudice show?) Simply because something is bigger it is not necessarily ‘better’, this applies to autos, bombs, hairdos (and other … um anatomical bits and pieces) and lies (despite however ‘often’ such lies may be spouted).

Of late “BIG” is most famously to be found in the concept of, “Too Big to Fail.”

How is that working for us?

;~D

It’s encouraging to know that Ford and GM know something about diesels.

I learned to drive in a diesel Vauxhall (i.e. GM) Corsa. Ford’s ECOnetic Fiesta is the dog’s bollocks, but as EW said, the problem is a tax structure for diesel that’s based entirely around commercial vehicles and the general perception of diesel as old tech, whereas hybrids are new tech. It has become an odd niche in passenger vehicles: it’s somehow okay to have diesel Mercs and Beemers and VWs, because they’re German cars with an established premium, but not a low-end Chevy or Ford.