Bradsher's most influential arguments involve safety. He contends that most SUV buyers think their vehicles are safer than cars and that this is a huge mistake. SUVs meet fewer government safety standards; they supposedly have poorer brakes, interact terribly with highway guardrails, and are especially vulnerable to rollovers, where their death rate is twice that of cars. And then, of course, there was the unforgettable Ford-Firestone tire disaster, which provided the rare spectacle of two companies severing a decades-long business relationship as each publicly blamed the other for a deadly product defect.
These critiques, however, add up to far less than one might think. In terms of overall occupant protection, cars and SUVs are practically equivalent in terms of fatality rates -- a point Bradsher acknowledges but which is easy for the reader to miss. Occupant fatality rates are the best single basis on which to compare the safety of these two vehicle types, because these rates represent each deadly type of accident in proportion to how frequently it occurs. The National Academy of Sciences' 2001 report on CAFE standards reported an annual occupant death rate for SUVs of 140 per million registered vehicles, compared to 138 for cars. All in all, the two types of vehicles were virtually identical in terms of safety.
Moreover, the largest SUVs, those over 5,000 pounds (e.g., Ford Expeditions, Chevy Tahoes, and Toyota Land Cruisers), had a lower rate than any other class of vehicle available: 92. The poorest-performing SUV category was the smallest: The under -3,000 pound vehicles, such as the 1997 Geo Tracker.
The death rate for this class, 195 per million, was more than double that of the biggest SUVs. But even these models outperformed minicars, whose death rate of 249 per million was the worst of any vehicle (unlike their fuel efficiency, which is tops). The smallest SUVs have been upsized over the years, moreover, and so there are practically no new SUV models in this least-crashworthy category.
In short, SUVs are probably as safe or safer than cars as a class. Moreover, those who choose the most despised SUV models (the largest ones) for safety reasons are not making a mistake.
Occupant protection, however, is only part of Bradsher's safety critique. Even if SUVs protect their occupants well, there is still the claim that they kill other people -- in particular, occupants of cars unlucky enough to collide with SUVs. Bradsher argues that SUV-car crash "incompatibility" accounts for perhaps 1,000 deaths per year.
Crash incompatibility is not a phenomenon that arose with sport utility vehicles. Trucks have long been incompatible with cars, and cars are incompatible with motorcycles, bicycles, and pedestrians. But while accident photos of subcompacts demolished by hulking SUVs grab attention, has the popularity of SUVs really changed the risks faced by car drivers? If it has, then the number of car drivers killed in two-vehicle crashes, as a fraction of all car drivers killed, should have risen dramatically as SUV sales soared.
But this simply hasn't happened, according to Dr. Leonard Evans, an internationally recognized traffic safety researcher: "If SUVs were substantially increasing risks to car occupants, then it must necessarily follow that this ratio would increase with increasing numbers of SUVs on the road. But in fact the data from 1994 forward show no hint of any such increase."
Even if owners were imposing serious new risks on car occupants, this fact would not justify government action. We accept altered automotive risk patterns all the time when technologies or consumer desires change. As Bradsher himself notes, the advent of theft-proof auto locks spurred a rise in carjackings. Carjacking is far more violent than other types of auto theft, but one could hardly argue that this risk of physical injury is a reason for outlawing good car locks.
But it is Bradsher's treatment of CAFE standards that is especially troubling. He uncritically accepts the need for government action to restrict gasoline consumption, then advocates CAFE-style mile-per-gallon regulatory mandates because the alternative of gasoline tax hikes is politically unfeasible. But tax hikes are unfeasible because they are highly visible, whereas CAFE's impact is supposedly acceptable because it's inconspicuous. Given Bradsher's concern about misleading industry campaigns, his endorsement of this opaque regulatory scheme is curious.
Especially given CAFE's somewhat notorious history. CAFE kills people by forcing manufacturers to make vehicles smaller and therefore less crashworthy than they otherwise would be. The Department of Transportation has steadfastly kept the public in the dark about this effect; in a 1992 lawsuit brought by the Competitive Enterprise Institute and Consumer Alert, a federal appeals court said the department's approach was based on "legerdemain" and "mumbo-jumbo." The 2001 National Academy of Sciences CAFE study estimated CAFE's lethal impact at between 1,300 and 2,600 lives per year.
Bradsher acknowledges this effect, though with far less detail than he devotes to SUV risks. He misses entirely the fact that the Ford-Firestone tire fiasco was due in part to Ford's quest for higher fuel economy. And while Bradsher describes several possible reforms of CAFE, it is not clear that any of them would alleviate the program's deadly impact on safety.
In an unintentionally amusing passage, Bradsher disparages the "automakers' absurd suspicions that a shadowy conspiracy of environmentalists, consumer activists and journalists wanted to take Americans' SUVs away." But between the "What Would Jesus Drive?" campaigners, the Arianna Huffington ads, and the recent torchings of SUVs on dealer lots by radical greens, those suspicions don't seem all that far-fetched. As "high and mighty" as SUVs might seem, they're nothing compared to the attitudes of their critics.
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