Just as our Founders told us they would under our system.
If not for the enviro-nuts, I figure the safety nuts would have pushed through a law mandating that everyone drive SUV’s.
Too bad they couldn’t convince people that airbags release something toxic into the air while they were at it…
Update: According to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, the safest category of passenger vehicles for the driver is “Cargo and large passenger vans”; SUV’s were about average. Interestingly enough, pickup trucks had a very high rate of driver fatalities; small and large pickups had a rate that was surpassed only by “mini cars”. Cars from midsize on up are safer than SUV’s. The mini car, not surprisingly, does worst of all, and I’d place a high likelihood of it being banned if not for the enviro-nuts.
Follow the link, look at “Driver deaths per million registered passenger vehicles 1-3 years old, by crash type, 2002”, then under the “All crashes” heading for the total risk to the driver in various automobiles.
Statistically, SUV’s are less safe than regular cars. I think it has to do with people thinking they’re safer.
Body-on-frame SUVs were far more dangerous than cars in single-vehicle crashes, because they had no crush zones to reduce impact on the occupants. Most new ones seem to be unibodies, but they still have high CG’s and the consequent propensity to rollover accidents and high fatalities from those. They combine these nasty properties with bumpers that are high enough to ride over the side-impact door beams of passenger cars, causing additional threats to third parties.
If we all wanted to be really safe, we’d get rid of SUVs and design all our cars to be like the old Volvos that could support a truck on the roof.
Is there a link somewhere in this post?
What the hell are the enviro-nuts going to do in the near future when the rest of science catches up with the fact that global warming is being caused by THE SUN GETTING HOTTER. Guess what – I’d have thought of that explantion first, wouldn’t you?
That the driver is the most important component of the system is shown by the dipsersed position of pick-ups, SUVs and large vans. All of these vehicles are built on the same chasises. They have different bodies, but they are all very big and very heavy and have high centers of gravity. They are marketed to different groups and this shows in the different death rates.