Welcome To Idiopathy

It should be obvious to all now that SUVs are here to stay. This particular type of conveyance started gaining notoriety in the mid-eighties as "ORVs". If only they had stayed Off Road Vehicles. Alas, they went on to garner major popularity thanks to soccer moms and rap stars around the world. The truth is, I hate them. They are over-sized, gas-guzzling menaces that have lost much of their use as "utility" vehicles. Thus, I must vent.

I shall vent by listing off the many problems I have with the wildebeasts. First though, I must make something clear. If you have an SUV, good for you. I don't care if you have ten of them. All I am doing is making an argument against them.

If you don't like my arguments, then simply ignore them. Surely there are at least three people out there that would get mad even if I dissed Pintos. It would not be personal, and neither is this article. Getting mad at me will do nothing but raise your blood pressure, anyway. Now that you've been warned, it's time for my formal list of complaints.

What's with the "women and SUVs" craze?:

I'll go ahead and get this one out of the way right now. Nothing is more annoying than seeing a five-foot tall woman crawl out of hulking Escalade that's two feet taller than she is. I don't get it. Do you want to be macho, or something? Does it give you a sense of power? The only power it puts into women for me is a dread-sense of impending doom.

Very small person + very big vehicle = very little visibility

What's more annoying in some aspects is the fact that this feminine fad has only served to further promote SUVs. Since I do not like SUVs, this is a very negative thing for me. Why can't you just get something small and easy to handle? Do you really need eight seats to carry three kids to school? Why do you need four-wheel-drive in the snow-free ashpalt jungle of Los Angeles? And what are you going to carry in the cargo space, a space shuttle? A minivan has virtually the same amount of room and cargo space, yet has much better gas mileage. Think about that in the future, ladies.

Why do they have to be so big?:

I could get into a whole psycho-analysis about how men with small...parts make up for it with big toys, but I shall not. Simply put, these things are accidents waiting to happen. Their sheer size and an (oft found) tendancy to be unstable during sharp cornering should be cause for great concern.

For a select few people, I'm sure that the size and cargo space of an SUV is invaluable. However, if you never haul anything and only have two friends, why do you need all the space? Are you afraid some emergency will pop up, requiring you to transport six people while simultaneously carrying a big-screen television in the back?

Personally, I think the size is just an ego thing. If that many people had a real need for so much cargo space, this country wouldn't be hurting so badly in the economic sense. People would be buying tons of lumber, large televisions, and groceries by the dumpster-full.

SUVs are VERY dangerous things:

Having had a couple of smaller cars in my life, I can attest to the fear experienced when you see a huge SUV hovering on your bumper. It is a fear that should be taken quite seriously. SUVs may be very safe for the its occupants in a crash, but the opposite is often true for the people in the other car.

If one compares the height of the bumper on an SUV to the height of a side window on a mid-size car, you'll see what I mean. That bumper will most likely be aimed squarely at the heads of the occupants. If you ever wondered why side-curtain airbags are becoming more common, now you have your answer.

The girth of the vehicle certainly doesn't help matters. In extreme cases, the weight of an SUV can be double that of a small vehicle. If such a collision was to occur, death would be the likely result for the driver of the smaller car.

Have you every seen an SUV with decent gas mileage?:

An average SUV probably gets an average of 10-15 MPG. Take into consideration that this was the average MPG back in the 1970s! Mid-size sedans in the same price range easily double that. Some smaller vehicles on the market triple that!

Maybe there wouldn't be such a gas crunch if there were fewer people driving over-sized gas guzzlers to and from work. What amazes me is that people are putting $40 worth of gas into their SUVs, but swearing not to get something smaller. I personally have seen one woman on television swear that she would not consider selling her SUV unless it cost $80 or more to fill it up!

The good news (at least for me) is that more people are turning towards fuel-efficient vehicles. This is of course due in large part to the recent hikes in the price-per-gallon of gasoline. While I wish they were ditching their mega-machines for a better reason, I'll take whatever I can get!

My hope for this article is that people will come away more informed about the many downsides of SUVs, if nothing else. They are often dangerous, unstable, gas-guzzling behemoths just looking for something to crush. They are often bought by people who will never utilyze them past 25% of their potential. I only hope I can pick up a few more believers along the way.

-JP