Free Drive by Tim Falconer

indeed, according to High and Mighty: The Dangerous Rise of the SUV , by Keith Bradsher, the sport ute has “a cushy suspension and other features that may even compromise some of its appeal to serious off-road drivers.”
    The roots of the SUV can be found in the Chevrolet Suburban, which first came out in 1935, and the Jeeps that Willys-Overland started making for the military during the Second World War. The 1963 Jeep Wagoneer didn’t sell well but led to vehicles such as the Ford Bronco and the Chevrolet Blazer, big two-door truck-cars that tended to be driven by people who lived in rural areas or actually used them for work. In the mid-1980s, Chrysler’s successful introduction of the four-door Jeep Cherokee—which MacDonald considers one of the milestone cars of automotive history—helped people see the SUV differently. And following the release of the Ford Explorer in 1990, these vehicles became a North American obsession. Today, SUV sales outnumber those of sedans, and even Porsche, the high-end sports car manufacturer, makes them.
    But if the minivan became boring, the SUV became increasingly controversial. As early as 1999, an episode of The Simpsons , called “Marge Simpson in: ‘Screaming Yellow Honkers,’” took a run at the behemoths. Homer buys a Canyonero that is, as the jingle promises, “twelve yards long and two lanes wide, sixty-five tons of American pride.” Unfortunately, he soon discovers that he bought the model that is “strong enough for a man, but made for a woman”—it even has a lipstick holder instead of a cigarette lighter. So he hotwires Marge’s station wagon and takes off in it, leaving his wife with the Canyonero. Initially reluctant, she’s sucked in by the SUV’s evil charms and soon develops road rage.
    Less satirically, Americans for Fuel Efficient Cars, an environmental group dedicated to decreasing the country’s reliance on foreign oil co-founded by columnist Arianna Huffington, created a hard-hitting 2003 commercial that intercut among different people saying they did things such as help blow up a nightclub, finance a terrorist training camp and teach children in other countries to hate America. Then, as “What is your SUV doing to our national security? Detroit, America needs hybrid cars now” appears on the screen, a man says, “I don’t even know how many miles it gets to the gallon.”
    Perhaps the most trenchant attack on these machines can be found in Bradsher’s High and Mighty . In a 2004 article on the dangers of SUVs, New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell called it “perhaps the most important book about Detroit since Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed .” Bradsher’s argument is that SUVs are a looming safety, oil-dependency and environmental hazard for North America.
    Although most drivers use them as big cars, SUVs are light trucks as far as regulators are concerned, because they are built on pickup truck underbodies. That distinction means little to most people—except that light trucks don’t have to meet the safety, fuel-efficiency and emissions standards that cars must. Worse, the size, the height and the four-wheel-drive capability of these well-insulatedcocoons give drivers a false sense of safety, a misconception that car companies and their ad agencies have been only too happy to encourage. The truth is that SUVs don’t handle as well as cars, so avoiding collisions is more difficult, and they often take longer to stop, especially in slippery conditions; while four-wheel drive improves tracking, it is overrated as a safety feature and makes no difference when braking; the vehicle’s weight and the stiffness of the truck chassis mean SUVs do poorly in crash tests; and the high centre of gravity makes them more prone to rollovers. “Sport utility vehicle occupants are at least as likely as car occupants to die in a crash,” writes