Dr. Gridlock drives an SUV

(From CafePress.) On Sunday, Dr. Gridlock let us know where he "sits" on transit issues.

'Obnoxious' SUVs

Dear Dr. Gridlock:

I find the letter by Seth Weizel [Dr. Gridlock, March 24] to be typical of the attitude held by most SUV drivers. NO, Mr. Weizel, I would NOT "love to drive an SUV with halogen lights and a DVD player."

As a matter of fact, I wouldn't have one if it were given to me.

These cars represent everything that's bad about Americans. They are big, wasteful and obnoxious. If Norman Rockwell were around today, he'd have to paint a new picture of America -- a 250-pound male, on the cell phone, behind the wheel of a Navigator.

Sylvia Willoughby
Crofton

Ouch. I'm a 250-pound male who owns an SUV. One of the things SUVs do for a driver, now that Mrs. Gridlock gave me one for Christmas (a new Toyota Highlander), is remove those dangerous, super-bright oncoming headlights from view. What's next -- even higher vehicles?
____________________
If you haven't read Malcolm Gladwell's story about SUVs, "Big and Bad: How the S.U.V. ran over automotive safety" from the New Yorker, I highly recommend it.

From the article:

In the history of the automotive industry, few things have been quite as unexpected as the rise of the S.U.V. Detroit is a town of engineers, and engineers like to believe that there is some connection between the success of a vehicle and its technical merits. But the S.U.V. boom was like Apple's bringing back the Macintosh, dressing it up in colorful plastic, and suddenly creating a new market. It made no sense to them. Consumers said they liked four-wheel drive. But the overwhelming majority of consumers don't need four-wheel drive. S.U.V. buyers said they liked the elevated driving position. But when, in focus groups, industry marketers probed further, they heard things that left them rolling their eyes.

As Keith Bradsher writes in High and Mighty--perhaps the most important book about Detroit since Ralph Nader's Unsafe at Any Speed--what consumers said was "If the vehicle is up high, it's easier to see if something is hiding underneath or lurking behind it." Bradsher brilliantly captures the mixture of bafflement and contempt that many auto executives feel toward the customers who buy their S.U.V.s. Fred J. Schaafsma, a top engineer for General Motors, says, "Sport-utility owners tend to be more like 'I wonder how people view me,' and are more willing to trade off flexibility or functionality to get that."

According to Bradsher, internal industry market research concluded that S.U.V.s tend to be bought by people who are insecure, vain, self-centered, and self-absorbed, who are frequently nervous about their marriages, and who lack confidence in their driving skills. Ford's S.U.V. designers took their cues from seeing "fashionably dressed women wearing hiking boots or even work boots while walking through expensive malls." Toyota's top marketing executive in the United States, Bradsher writes, loves to tell the story of how at a focus group in Los Angeles "an elegant woman in the group said that she needed her full-sized Lexus LX 470 to drive up over the curb and onto lawns to park at large parties in Beverly Hills." One of Ford's senior marketing executives was even blunter: "The only time those S.U.V.s are going to be off-road is when they miss the driveway at 3 a.m."