Which 4WD SUV?

[Charlie]

[JayB]

Are SUVs Really the Dangerous, Gas Guzzling Brutes They're Made out to Be?

October 15, 2002

 

As automakers sell more and more sport utility vehicles, a populist backlash is gaining ground amongst people who despise them. They berate SUVs for their poor fuel economy and allegedly unsafe design. But are these popular vehicles really as dangerous as they’re made out to be? Let's look at the facts.

 

"According to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS), for every million SUVs on U.S. roads, there are about 139 fatalities a year. By comparison, for every million passenger cars there are 126 fatalities a year. The most recent data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) shows there are over 14 million SUVs registered in the U.S. That means there are around 200 additional fatalities a year due to people driving SUVs instead of passenger cars.

 

However, while no one wants to see even one additional fatality, this number has to be placed in the context of all people killed in traffic accidents. There are about 42,000 people killed in motor vehicle accidents every year in the U.S. So the additional fatalities due to SUVs are a mere fraction of a percent - not good - but not the outrageous carnage the anti-SUV crowd claims."

 

"...also berates SUVs because they are more prone to roll over than passenger cars in an accident, which is absolutely true. SUVs (and pick-up trucks and full-size vans) sit higher than passenger cars, which raises their center of gravity and makes it easier for them to roll them over in an accident, or in severe driving maneuvers. Indeed, 63 percent of all SUV fatalities are due to rollovers.

 

But data from NHTSA also show that 66 percent of all those killed in SUVs were not wearing their seatbelts. Just getting SUV drivers and occupants to buckle up would lower the fatality rate of these vehicles to less than those of passenger cars...Also keep in mind that in every other type of accident, SUVs are safer than passenger cars. Rollovers account for about one out of every five accidents for all vehicles."

 

 

"SUVs are also attacked for being gas-guzzling brutes. And there's no question that they do get significantly lower fuel economy than most passenger cars. But would forcing SUVs to get the same fuel economy of passenger cars make a tremendous dent in U.S. gasoline consumption?

 

There is no SUV fuel economy standard per se. The standards are for passenger cars and light trucks. Cars have to meet an average of 27.5 mpg. Trucks have to achieve an average of 20.7 mpg. But those are averages for an automaker's fleet of new vehicles. Each automaker must figure out the fuel economy of all the light trucks that it built in a year and make sure that the average is 20.7 mpg. Some trucks (which include pick-ups, SUVs, minivans, and full-size vans) get well under 20.7 others get more than that. But the sales-weighted average must come to 20.7 mpg.

 

A rough calculation would be to calculate the number of gallons of gasoline a vehicle uses in a year if it gets 20.7 mpg and drives 15,000 miles a year (the miles driven is the number the EPA uses). That comes to 724 gallons. The same calculation at 27.5 mpg comes out to 545 gallons. Thus the savings per SUV, assuming it had to achieve 27.5 mpg, would be 179 gallons.

 

Now, let's multiply the savings in gallons by the number of SUVs made every year, about 3.8 million, and the annual gasoline savings would be 680 million gallons. Of course that's only the savings for all the new SUVs. It doesn't count what's already out on the road. But let's say that in the next 10 years total SUV registrations hit 40 million units. That would save 7 billion gallons a year. But keep in mind that the U.S. uses about 5 billion of gallons of gasoline every two weeks!

 

Forcing SUVs to achieve passenger car fuel economy would reduce the nation's dependence on oil. But overall it would only save less than three weeks' worth of consumption."

 

The anti-SUV crowd should be applauded for pressuring automakers to build safer and more fuel efficient SUVs. But their virulent diatribes against these vehicles grossly overstate the problems they cause.

 

 

[Charlie]

JoshK said:

virulent diatribes

[JoshK]

You even know what those big words mean, Charlie?

[lummox]

JoshK said: virulent diatribes

a friend of mine injects insulin for that shit.

 

[Bronco]

This morning I gave a big to an Excursion and an Expedition both with just the driver in them. They waved and smiled like they were in a parade or something.

[gregm]

maybe jon & timm@y should make some statistic for number of days/weeks a thread has stayed on recent posts page? kind of like top 40 has number of weeks on the charts. anyway, i think this stupid fucking thread would definately be on there.

[j_b]

let’s note the source of the document you posted: Visteon Corporation out of Detroit. in their own words: “Our customers include the 19 largest vehicle manufacturers in the world.”

 

http://www.visteon.com/newsroom/autoline/2002/101502.shtml

 

i won’t bother asking why you cut out the following sentence: “A new book titled High And Mighty—The World’s Most Dangerous Vehicles And How They Got To Be That Way points out that SUVs have a higher fatality rate than passenger cars, and it's true.”

 

or why you cut out any other reference to the book by Bradsher (cited above).

 

in response to the spin on fatality rate: “SUVs are no safer than cars for their occupants, and pose much greater dangers for other road users. SUV occupants die slightly more often than car occupants in crashes. The occupant death rate in crashes per million SUVs on the road is 6 percent higher than the death rate per million cars. The occupant death rate for the largest SUVs, which tend to be driven by middle-aged families, is 8 percent higher than the occupant death rate for minivans and upper-midsize cars like the Ford Taurus and Toyota Camry, which are typically driven by similar families. SUV occupants are much more likely than car occupants to die in a rollover, which accounts for about 1,000 more deaths a year than if the same people had been in cars. In collisions with other vehicles, however, SUVs are nearly three times as likely as cars to kill other drivers, inflicting another 1,000 unnecessary deaths a year among motorists who would have survived if hit instead by cars of the same weight.”

 

http://www.detroitproject.com/readmore/myths.htm

 

the part about fuel consumption is a classic case of muddying the water. if the average car goes 27 mpg (by no means as high as it should be) and the average SUV goes 20mpg, it means that the typical SUV guzzles 33% more gas than the average car …. end of story. how much this represents of total US consumption is a function of how many guzzlers are on the road (increasing at a fast rate). anyway, 3 weeks of gas is 6% of total US yearly consumption which is not negligible by any standard.

 

also note that despite all attempts at minimizing the bad news, the bottom line of the piece you posted confirms what we already new: as we should attempt to consume less gas, we consume significantly more; as we should be making safer cars, we make them significantly less safe.

 

 

 

[RobBob]

So I had another SUV dream last night. Believe it or not, this time I’m entered in a Pan-American road race. And my sidekick is none other than…you guessed it…Jim. I’ve entered the “leather seated vehicle” (as Jim likes to refer to it) and Jim has brought along his chainsaw and winch to help us negotiate the junglier parts of the route. As we move southward through Chiapas and into Salvador, I am finding that Jim is actually a pretty good raconteur and race partner. There is that touchy incident when I discover that he has packed an entire duffel full of stickers…( which he says he intends to use on a sidetrip on the way home…to put on all the old Suburbans that rumble around on Venezuela’s oil-rich roads)…other than that, the race is going well.

 

We are in the lead, already a half-day ahead of the other racers, with my 4.7-liter V8 engine purring like a well-fed mountain lion. I have discovered that Jim is quite the mechanic, changing the oil each night because of the hard going. Seems he learned the art from tinkering on his first vehicle, a 1970 Dodge Powerwagon that he used to roam the streets of Sea-town with as a kid. Jim gets mad when I attempt to find a stormsewer to deposit our waste oil.

 

By day three, we are racing through the banana-laden fincas of Costa Rica, good-naturedly arguing the politics of groundwater allocation, enjoying the exotic wildlife that we spot as we drive. Jim is frustrated that I cannot seem to avoid running over the scads of treefrogs that we encounter on the road at dusk, just as we reach the border of Panama…but as we watch the alpenglow fade on Vocan Baru to the east, the tension is forgotten. Jim burns one and we stop for supper and cervezas.

 

Midway through day four, the skies darken, just as we leave behind the tall buildings of downtown Panama City. As any of you who have driven southward from there know, this is where the going gets sketchy, to say the least. Twenty miles out of town, the blacktop ends, and we trundle down a dusty, washboard road toward the menacing Istmo del Darien. The going gets harder and harder, but we push on into the night, afraid to stop in the dangerous netherworld that separates Panama and Colombia.

 

Like lightning it happens---we are beset by ambushing drug smugglers. We seem to be losing the battle, when I hear Jim’s chainsaw roar to a start, and I see him parrying and slashing, in a kind of crazed, reverse-Scarface rage! The 4Runner springs to life as I engage all 350 horsepower and we charge away from the bandits, saved only by Jim’s chainsaw prowess and my V8 SUV…the horror…the horror!!

 

I awaken in a terrible sweat.

 

[JoshK]

Umm, rob, in all seriousness, I hope you didn't buy the 4runner because you thought it had a 350hp V8? I'm hoping you made a typo because I'd hate to be the one to break it to you that it only has 235hp.

[RobBob]

(grumble grumble...f'ing kids today...Hemingway never had to put up with these frickin little geniuses trying to ruin his stories...mutter mutter)

[JoshK]

It was funny anyway. I just wanted to let you know you had the right to go beat down on car dealer ass if that was the case.

[JayB]

j_b said:

let’s note the source of the document you posted: Visteon Corporation out of Detroit. in their own words: “Our customers include the 19 largest vehicle manufacturers in the world.”

 

http://www.visteon.com/newsroom/autoline/2002/101502.shtml

 

i won’t bother asking why you cut out the following sentence: “A new book titled High And Mighty—The World’s Most Dangerous Vehicles And How They Got To Be That Way points out that SUVs have a higher fatality rate than passenger cars, and it's true.”

 

or why you cut out any other reference to the book by Bradsher (cited above).

 

in response to the spin on fatality rate: “SUVs are no safer than cars for their occupants, and pose much greater dangers for other road users. SUV occupants die slightly more often than car occupants in crashes. The occupant death rate in crashes per million SUVs on the road is 6 percent higher than the death rate per million cars. The occupant death rate for the largest SUVs, which tend to be driven by middle-aged families, is 8 percent higher than the occupant death rate for minivans and upper-midsize cars like the Ford Taurus and Toyota Camry, which are typically driven by similar families. SUV occupants are much more likely than car occupants to die in a rollover, which accounts for about 1,000 more deaths a year than if the same people had been in cars. In collisions with other vehicles, however, SUVs are nearly three times as likely as cars to kill other drivers, inflicting another 1,000 unnecessary deaths a year among motorists who would have survived if hit instead by cars of the same weight.”

 

http://www.detroitproject.com/readmore/myths.htm

 

the part about fuel consumption is a classic case of muddying the water. if the average car goes 27 mpg (by no means as high as it should be) and the average SUV goes 20mpg, it means that the typical SUV guzzles 33% more gas than the average car …. end of story. how much this represents of total US consumption is a function of how many guzzlers are on the road (increasing at a fast rate). anyway, 3 weeks of gas is 6% of total US yearly consumption which is not negligible by any standard.

 

also note that despite all attempts at minimizing the bad news, the bottom line of the piece you posted confirms what we already new: as we should attempt to consume less gas, we consume significantly more; as we should be making safer cars, we make them significantly less safe.

 

 

 

Those segments contained arguments that make use of actual data and concrete figures that show precisely how much extra fuel the nation consumes as a result of increased SUV sales, and exactly how many additional fatalities result from driving them. They clearly show that neither the change in the level of fuel consumption nor the safety issues associated with them are as great as the anti-SUV posters on this board have claimed.

 

The more you argue this point, the more clear it has become that your objections to SUVs are not based on factual information, or a rational assesment of their impact on the environment and the safety of the motoring public.

 

[j_b]

Those segments contained arguments that make use of actual data and concrete figures that show precisely how much extra fuel the nation consumes as a result of increased SUV sales, and exactly how many additional fatalities result from driving them. They clearly show that neither the change in the level of fuel consumption nor the safety issues associated with them are as great as the anti-SUV posters on this board have claimed.

 

The more you argue this point, the more clear it has become that your objections to SUVs are not based on factual information, or a rational assesment of their impact on the environment and the safety of the motoring public.

 

I am not sure where you got the notion that a book written by an award winning journalist (who has reported on the auto industry for decades) should be less accurate than a one-page piece written by an automobile industry corporation.

 

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/rollover/interviews/bradsher.html

 

do you mean the following is not accurate factual information?

"if the average car goes 27 mpg (by no means as high as it should be) and the average SUV goes 20mpg, it means that the typical SUV guzzles 33% more gas than the average car …. end of story. how much this represents of total US consumption is a function of how many guzzlers are on the road (increasing at a fast rate). anyway, 3 weeks of gas is 6% of total US yearly consumption which is not negligible by any standard."

[allthumbs]

I just took the cat. converters off my truck. Now I can really pollute. Fuck the environment.

[lummox]

trask said:

I just took the cat. converters off my truck. Now I can really pollute. Fuck the environment.

amateur move. shoulda just started with diesel. like a v10 ram pickemup truck. mandatory to start it and let it idle every morning for 45 minutes to smoke out your neighbors.

[allthumbs]

lummox said:

trask said:

I just took the cat. converters off my truck. Now I can really pollute. Fuck the environment.

amateur move. shoulda just started with diesel. like a v10 ram pickemup truck. mandatory to start it and let it idle every morning for 45 minutes to smoke out your neighbors.

No diesels for this child. I'm not driving anything that's so damn loud I have to shut it off at the Mickey D drive-up window to place my order. Besides that, they stink.

[lummox]

trask said:

[No diesels for this child. I'm not driving anything that's so damn loud I have to shut it off at the Mickey D drive-up window to place my order. Besides that, they stink.

just tow around a burning tire then

[iain]

if I bought another car it would be a diesel.

[allthumbs]

My next car is going to be a Ford Excursion with an 8" lift kit and the biggest gas motor they offer.

[JoshK]

trask said:

My next car is going to be a Ford Excursion with an 8" lift kit and the biggest gas motor they offer.

 

There is one of these roaming around bellevue and suburbia. Me and a couple of friends had spoted it several times. One day my friend sees the thing pull up to a keg steakhouse where he was eating. The guy hopes out of it and my friend said he was pushing 5' 2" max.

[RobBob]

[lummox]

JoshK said:

trask said:

My next car is going to be a Ford Excursion with an 8" lift kit and the biggest gas motor they offer.

 

There is one of these roaming around bellevue and suburbia. Me and a couple of friends had spoted it several times. One day my friend sees the thing pull up to a keg steakhouse where he was eating. The guy hopes out of it and my friend said he was pushing 5' 2" max.

you saying hes trying to compensate for sumpin?

[freeclimb9]

never mind

Edited April 18, 2003 by freeclimb9

[JoshK]

Can somebody more familiar with modified trucks please explain to me how doing something as pictured in the giant excursion picture helps you with clearance? It seems you still have pretty much stock clearance below the axles. It seems all this does is raise the body up, eh?