SUVs are gas-guzzlers and block other drivers' view and generally irritate a lot of people, but they also raise ethical questions.
I've been talking to people who drive SUVs. The first thing I noticed about my admittedly small sample was a gender difference: women I asked why they drove an SUV all said "I feel safe driving it." The men said different things: several talked about good visibility, others about good traction in snow. Interestingly, no one mentioned off-road use. But one guy gave the game away when he said: "I'm king of the hill! Everybody gives way."
There're many things I and others don't like about SUVs: they're dangerous to cars because of their height and weight; they use a lot of gas; they block other drivers' view; they're less safe than their owners think because they roll over more easily than cars; and they're just too big for how most are used. What gets overlooked, though, is that SUVs encourage bad driving.
I've been keeping track of who cuts me off on the street and highway, and it's more often an SUV than a car. Even with the large number of SUVs on the road, that's surprising because cars still outnumber SUVs by a good margin.
The guy who said he felt like king of the hill was right, and the women who said they felt safe were right, and that combination is the problem: feeling safe and feeling you've got the edge on traffic makes you drive more aggressively.
I've ridden in several SUVs and rented one for a week. I'm impressed with the advantage of sitting higher up and with how SUVs feel sturdier than sedans. It's definitely empowering to look down on traffic from a solid-feeling position. It's no surprise, then, that driving an SUV inclines one to drive more aggressively.
As for safety, putting aside roll-overs there's no question that if you're in an SUV in an accident with a sedan, you're going to come out ahead. I think there's an ethical problem in this, because SUV owners are protecting themselves at the cost of doing much more damage to other vehicles and their drivers in an accident. But on reflection, I think the more pressing ethical problem is how SUVs encourage aggressive driving.
Aggressive driving not only endangers other drivers, it also consistently annoys them. In short, too many SUV drivers not only pose a physical threat to other drivers, they add significantly to all the hassles that make life just that much harder.
