[...]... during the last decade, and are on their way to taking over the world's roads The four-wheel-drive vehicles offer a romantic vision of outdoor adventure to deskbound baby boomers The larger models provide lots of room for families and their gear Their size gives them an image of safety The popularity of SUVs has revived the economy of the upper Midwest and has helped power the American economy since the. .. and marketed SUVs despite their reservations about the vehicle's practicality and safety Some of the quotes were gathered during interviews for The Times Others were gathered during a book leave that The Times generously granted me for this project, a leave of absence that allowed me to explore the history and problems of SUVs in much greater depth, gathering a lot of new information A few quotes and. .. in the years to come The safety hazards of SUVs have been mitigated until now because they have mainly attracted the safest drivers in America The principal buyers of SUVs in the 1990s and early 2000s have been baby boomers in their 40s, with some sales to people in their 30s and 50s These affluent first owners of SUVs tend to be the most cautious drivers on the road, because they are mostly middle-aged... people who have plenty of driving experience and still have acute vision, hearing and mental faculties Half of them also have families, so they are much less likely to be out driving in the wee hours of the morning, when crash rates soar There are 20 million SUVs on the nation's roads and more than half of them are less than five years old Three-quarters of the fullsize SUVs, the largest models, are... failed Ford and Firestone have been rightly condemned for cutting corners in the design and manufacturing of the Explorer and the tires, and for doing little for several years as some of their employees learned of problems with the tires Yet terrible as the tire-related crashes have been, killing as many as 300 people worldwide over the last decade, they are just a tiny part of the safety and environmental... outside Detroit, the carved wood busts supporting the ceiling in the ballroom show the inventor of the Model T and three close friends, all famous: Harvey Firestone, founder of the tire company that bears his name; Thomas Edison, inventor of the lightbulb and phonograph; and John Burroughs, the naturalist The four men loved to go on camping trips in the 1920s, accompanied by cooks and other servants in... and marketed primarily to them, with a cushy suspension and other features that may even compromise some of its appeal to serious off-road drivers In the last few years, automakers have begun taking car designs and making them considerably taller and adding four-wheel drive, so as to market the result as an SUV These vehicles, like the Toyota Highlander, which is derived from the Camry sedan, are often... would take far longer, and require the building of factories in the United States to get around the tariffs Because of the chicken dispute, light trucks would remain the almost exclusive turf of Detroit automakers all the way into the late 1990s Time and again, government regulators would soften the blow of new rules by applying them first to cars and only later, if at all, to the Detroit-dominated... pedestrians onto the relatively soft hood For all their deadliness to other motorists, SUVs are no safer than cars for their own occupants Indeed, they are less safe The occupant death rate per million SUVs is actually 6 percent higher than the occupant death rate per million cars The biggest SUVs, which pose the greatest hazards to other motorists, have an 8 percent higher death rate for their occupants... 1990 to half the luxury market by 1996 But SUVs still make up only 10 percent of the vehicles currently registered in the United States Most of the automobiles built in the 1980s are still on the road, and these are INTRODUCTION xvii mostly cars, so this has been holding down the percentage of all vehicles on the road that are SUVs As older model years of vehicles are scrapped, however, they are being . boomers. The larger models provide lots of room for families and their gear. Their size gives them an image of safety. The popularity of SUVs has revived the economy of the upper. Type Book Works. Set in Meridien Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data Bradsher, Keith. High and mighty: the dangerous rise of the SUV / Keith Bradsher.—1st ed. p. cm. ISBN . families, pocketbooks, and environment, and buy all-around better cars." —Ralph Nader MIGHTY The Dangerous Rise of the SUV KEITH BRADSHER PublicAffairs New York HIGH Copyright © 2002,