After taking the long-awaited drive home for vacation, I have become more aware of the amount of cars on the road and just how obnoxious we are as drivers. Not only are highways overpopulated, but they are overpopulated with inefficient and unnecessary vehicles.
Sport utility vehicles have now expanded from something to tow your boat with into the new family minivan or ghetto-fabulous ride. As a result of this image update, the number of SUVs on the road is rising, and now small cars are confronted with new safety concerns.
Consumers fail to acknowledge that large SUVs are only the safest cars on the road because they cause the most damage. According to a New York Times press release, when an SUV and a car get into an accident, the car passengers are four times more likely to die than if the accident occurred between two cars of similar size. When a car is broadsided by an SUV, the car passengers are 27 times more likely to die. Cars are designed to withstand collisions with vehicles of the same shape and within 500 pounds of their own weight. SUVs tend to weigh at least 1,000 pounds more than the average car and therefore will always cause more damage than the car is capable of sustaining.
While some say that the solution is to raise the saftey figures of small cars, I would suggest only marketing SUVs for those of us who need to tow houses and the like. It is entirely common to see SUVs transporting nothing more than their drivers ‹ no passengers, no cargo, certainly no houses. So unless you roll with a posse, have a family of six, a boat, two horses and a trailer, you should not be driving an SUV!
Driving solo in an SUV is just plain wasteful. Each gallon of gas burned puts 20 pounds of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The Environmental Protection Agency stated that choosing a car that gets 25 miles to the gallon over a car that only gets 20 miles will keep 10 tons of carbon dioxide from being released over the car¹s lifetime. SUV manufacturers are not required by law to maintain efficient fuel economy levels for oversized vehicles and therefore can legally make a car that is not only expensive to buy, but expensive to drive. Ford Excursions, for example, get only 10 miles to the gallon in the city and 13 on the highway, if you are lucky.
Marketing has prompted families to replace that good ol¹ minivan with oversized SUVs. While this strategy increased sales and made some business-heads wealthier, it created problems for those of us who share the road. Keeping a safe distance while driving is impossible now because drivers in Suburbans see that as merging space, and parking lots are always hell because SUV drivers seem to think that lines designating parking places are mere suggestions.
Perhaps in order to drive an oversized vehicle, a special license should be required, similar to drivers of motorcycles and big-rigs. If that were instituted, maybe those moms will learn to park or learn to stick to the minivan they know. By adding the obstacle of the DMV, consumers will choose cars appropriate for their daily use and in turn save lives and make cleaner air for all of us.
For those of you concerned with image, don¹t be discouraged. While bumping in an Escalade may be money, cruising in the new custom Caddy ‹ the Snoop Deville ‹ is pimp and energy-efficient!
