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Safety and Sport Utility Vehicles and Pickup Trucks
Randy, surely Arrianna's gut is from champaigne and not beer. If she spent more time climbing in and out of a tall SUV, she might work some of that off. 
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Safety and Sport Utility Vehicles and Pickup Trucks
Crash of the Titans. A great example of how plenty of steel around you can let you walk away. I am surprised nobody was killed in this accident just because of the head on sudden stoppage. In view of how severe the crash was, it looks like both vehicles held up pretty well. Anyhow, it was an interesting article. I can't imagine what it must have cost to repair the Hummer if it was even possible.
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Safety and Sport Utility Vehicles and Pickup Trucks
That was over a year ago in Mark's old neighborhood. Pretty amazing. I saw an H2 that was rolled off-road. It crushed the front right side, hood and windshield, but it was still driving. (not as bad as this picture)
There was a lot of damage up high on the H2, so bumper mismatch seems not to have been a factor. The hood is reinforced plastic like the fenders on my tractor. Do you think that the driver would have been treated and released if he had been driving a sports car when he had his seizure??
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Safety and Sport Utility Vehicles and Pickup Trucks
Maybe it's just me, but that Goat Truck in the background doesn't seem to be any worse off than the Hummer....
Still, bigger IS better, REALLY big is better still....
Best of luck.
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Murf, do you think that the four or five vehicles that the H2 hit before that had any "impact" on that?
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About ten years ago I bought a Jeep Grand Cherokee for my wife who was having our first child. It made sense then to carry the Kids and dog and stuff plus the safety factor and winter traction. A Jeep was pretty big then, not so now!
My last car was my 1996 Honda Accord. By 2000 the number of really big SUV 's like the Expedition, Excursion, Yukon..... was so dense where I live that driving in that little Accord was no longer a pleasurable experience.
My typical trip would have someone with questionable driving skills right on my tail while they chatted on the phone or did their makeup, or shouted at the their kids or had the Dog in their lap. Pulling over to let them pass did not work either because they would then drive slower in front of you than you were driving in the first place, or the next SUV would get on your tail. The other thing is that most SUV lights are so much higher off the ground having one behind a car is very uncomfortable to the driver.
I am not a slow driver either, it is just that the style here in NJ is to Tail Gate, it does not necessarily mean that the person behind you wants to pass all the time either.
I got rid of the Honda in 2000 replacing it with the Toyota Tundra. I have not had the angst that I used to have with the Honda. I miss the better mileage, but fortunately I am putting less miles on the Truck than I used on the Accord.
Bigger is Better as far I am concerned, until the government coerces everyone to be smaller.
Dennis
TractorPoint
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When we moved to NM, my wife had an Olds Cutlass that was coming off of a lease. We replaced that with a Pontiac Bonneville. After about a year of driving the Bonneville, my wife said that she thought it was "too big" and she wanted a Jeep. I still had my 1992 GMC pickup and that was even bigger.
Bottom line is that I bought the Jeep for her, but it had to have the big tires, upgraded tranny and differential and so forth. She likes it, but it is a little small for me.
I ended up driving the Bonneville for the three remaining years of its lease. I liked the car. I did not like driving it in traffic for the same reasons that Dennis mentioned. Someone must have been smiling down on me, because in every event when I have been hit by a drunk or inattentive driver, I was in my truck. I did better than 75% of my driving in the car.
I always liked my truck, but the Bonneville got better gas milage by far and my wife was not going to drive it. You get raped when you try to turn in a lease car early. But as Dennis said, headlights from trucks and tailgaters always caused an undue amount of stress while driving the car. There are a lot of accidents around here involving semi-trucks. We are at the intersection of two major interstates and there is a lot of long haul traffic.
I drove the Bonneville until the lease was up about a year ago. When I went to the dealership to turn it in, a new shipment of H2s was coming off the truck. I had already looked at other SUVs and was really considering a Cadillac car, but I liked the H2 and went in that direction.
I feel safer in the SUV. The numbers tend to back up that feeling of safety. I expect that I would be better off in a collision, but there are no winners in a wreck.
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OK, OK, OK.........if your promise not to snicker and laugh too much; I'll tell ya what I drive around locally. This can substitute for the joke o the day.
I don't really use it that much any more since I retired. It was my commuter car. I drove about 75 - 80 miles a day back and forth to work and it got me 32 mpg. I have had it for going on 17 years and she is still kickin'. It is a 1987 Nissan Pulsar NX SE. A little 2 door hatch back 2 seater with a joke fold down rear seat and hatch back. It was a bad little machine when it was new. It has a 1.6L DOHC 112 hp engine that red lines at 7200 rpm and it would do over 130 mph new on the Autobahn. (the speedo stops at 130 but the needle would keep going to the trip odometer reset and stop) (I bought it in Germany while stationed there where everyone has a puddle jumper car)
She would rap up to about 7300 rpms in 5th gear going down hill and I could draft the Porche's or BMW's and hull butt and hang with them for a little while! She is kinda tired now but still runs pretty good for almost 150,000 miles. I would NEVER want to hit ANYTHING in this car as it would fold up like a paper cup. It would be a death trap in any kind of collision.
With a wife and 3 little girls I much prefer the Dodge Cummins. I hate to sell the Nissan cause it is so old , it is not worth anything but it still runs good so it is worth it to me to just keep running it until it dies.
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Bigger is safer for you if you are driving, but the statistic also say they are a hazard for the person in the smaller car.
The large SUV has become like the large station wagon of old, the family lugger. To a certain extent the engineering is the same and we have moved to the same vehicles our father's drove only with slightly different bodies. Unfortunately the driving skills do not match the mass.
When I was young I lived in an area where the roads were like the California. The rod rodders (car boys) tended to get a car souped up and then proceed to place it in the ditch. It never made sense to me to build a quarter miler in an area where the only straight paved flat quarter mile had hair pin turns at either end. To this end we went the road race route. Going fast made no sense unless you could negociate the next corner.
My 544 s with ported B20 would walk almost any car, cornered well and topped 130. Including stops for gas. I travelled from Terrace to Vancouver once in 12 hours (Mark). We would race at Westwood or the Boundary Bay Airport. In MA I worked with a friend on VSCCA MG cars and raced them on the track.
In 97 I bought a new Ford truck with the extra cab. I drove it a while and then I remember thinking this thing drives like a car. Then it hit me I had bought my fathers Crown Vic.
Like Chief I drive the Ram 3500 on distance trips. Only the truckers argue with me as most SUVs are smaller than the beast. Still it gets 20 miles to the gallon, better than the SUV and more useful to me.
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Peters, I agree with pretty much everything you said in your last post.
My first "project" car was an Olds 442. When new, it was fast, but did not corner well. In college, I took classes in automotive engineering and modified the car for different suspension geometry and got it handling pretty well for the day. The motor and transmission were pretty good from the factory. We actually tested this car on a track layed out in a parking lot for my classes. I wrote a number of papers about the project.
During the 1980s I had a modified Mazda RX7. That was my basic street car. I am glad that I never had a wreck in that thing. The body panels were about as heavy as a soda can. Some of my friends set a land speed record at the Bonneville dry lakebed with their similarly modified RX7. Driving motorcycles gave me a different perspective about traffic and collisions, so I drove the Mazda defensively. I satisfied any "need for speed" that I might have had on a race track and flying small airplanes.
My offroad days started with motorcycles in 1972 and progressed to off-road cars and trucks after a pretty severe crash in an off-road motorcycle race in the California Desert. (I raced unlimited class bikes) Ultimately my off-roading turned into racing with a team in Baja California Mexico in the Baja 500 and 1000 races. I was also a professional off-road guide in Baja.
The suspensions on today's SUVs allow them to handle better on the street than my Olds 442 did when it was new. But, they still have a high center of gravity and if someone gets into them and attempts to drive them like a sports car, they are going to get hurt. I am generally not in favor of heavily modified vehicles any more. For cars, the most noticable mods seem to be on the engines and it is easy to over-power and out-drive the supsensions and safety equipment. The teenager that bought my Olds ended up killing himself in it; street racing. The guy that bought my Mazda gave it to his teenage son who totaled it within the first year that he had it; again street racing. These are the same streets that you and I drive on everyday.
People that modify trucks generally are after a "look" more than they are after some performance increase. In my experience, many of the trucks with the "look" do not perform as well as they should and generally the suspension modifications tend to degrade handling on newer vehicles. Most people just do not know how to set up the suspension correctly and bolt on parts are rarely selected and used in the correct ways.
I don't think that the answer to the safety question is to make the SUVs car-like. If the market wanted car-like SUVs, then the station wagon would still be popular. In my opinion the station wagon has largely been replaced by the Minivan and to a lesser degree by the SUV.
No matter what you drive, there will always be a larger vehicle that will fair better in a crash. You cannot eliminate trains, commercial trucks, military vehicles and construction equipment from crossing or using roads. But, I do have a choice on the type of vehicle that I drive, and that is often the only choice that is really available. Part of the answer may be to make the smaller vehicles more crash worthy, but as you said in an earlier post, people don't wear seatbelts like they should.
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10-14-2003, 12:02 
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