High and Mighty: SUVs--The World's Most Dangerous Vehicles and How They Got That Way

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Summary: Bradsher is right
Review: After reading the entire book, word for word, I'm wondering why he even wrote the book. Half the complaints were already heard on the NY Times and he didn't even offer the other half some writing space. It seems like his sole goal was to demoralize SUV owners and make them feel ashamed that they fell for advertising tricks that somehow hypnotized them into buying one. Well I'm sorry Mr. Pulitzer Prize finalist wannabe, but that's not the way it is at all. Though he provides a few great points, his information mostly relates to the mid-90s and not at all to the changing times. If you're against SUVs, then I would recommend this book to pump yourself up, for others I would rather not.

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Summary: Detroit's Incompetence and Greed Costs Us All
Review: An excellent book that touches on the most egregious (and least reported) design flaw of truck-based SUVs: impact incompatibility with cars. Under the flashy exterior and leather-trimmed interior of most overpriced SUVs lies a heavy, crude, and most importantly for Detroit's bean-counters, inexpensive chassis. It offers little energy absorption during a collision and is attached to a high bumper that defeats the side-impact protection of most passenger cars. All in the interest of profit and vanity.

Millions of Americans are injured and over 40,000 killed in automobile accidents each year. The combined human and economic toll is astonishing, dwarfing that of terrorism, SARS, West Nile, and other media obsessions. As an engineer, I find the SUV status quo appalling: unit body construction, crumple zones, and car-compatible bumper heights would significantly improve the safety of the SUV (for both its own occupants and those of the vehicle it smashes into). Read Bradsher's book, understand how Detroit's callous penny-pinching led to this sorry state, and do something to change it.

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Summary: Excellent Book, Whiny Critics
Review: As soon as I started reading this well-researched and interesting book, I could here the right-wingers grinding their teeth..."Stupid commie liberal pinko pantywaist trying to tell ME what to drive?! This isn't Russia...blah, blah, blah..." And sure enough, that's the tone in a number of critical reviews posted here. Well folks, Bradsher isn't proposing banning SUVs, but he does propose ways to make them safer, and suggests for most people, a large sedan or a minivan would serve them just as well, and be a lot safer for the driver and everyone else on the road. Although this thoughtful book is well worth a read, I don't expect any of its suggested reforms to be implemented any time soon. Certainly not with our current crop of leaders...

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Summary: This book is hard to put down
Review: HIGH AND MIGHTY is an outstanding book, that documents the many negatives and downfalls of the SUV. Keith Bradsher does an excellent job of explaining his points and conclusions with well researched evidence. Bradsher is aiming to persuade his readers not to give into the false sense of security that SUVs imply. He wants the reader to know "the dark side of the SUV", one part of Bradsher's book.

HIGH AND MIGHTY has three parts with in his book. First Bradsher starts with The Birth of The SUV, then he moves into The Dark Side Of The SUV. Both these parts explain the beginnings and the problems of the SUV in many detailed ways. The last part of Bradsher's book is The Future of The SUV. This part touches upon the future drivers of the SUV, an increase in SUVs, and also solutions that can help with America's SUV problem.

Rating:
Summary: This book is hard to put down
Review: I have watched with complete bewilderment the growing popularity of SUVs. They are too big to fit in many parking spaces and parking garages. Some are so big that they don't fit in home garages. They guzzle gas, they are dangerous (15% higher death rate for people in SUVs), they are hard to maneuver, and let's face it they are UGLY. Some people have legitimate reasons to buy an SUV, however for most people a car is a better choice. Yet why the popularity of SUVs? I just don't get it.

My confusion led me to buy this book. And it is a great book, which is hard to put down. You might think that more than 400 pages of text about SUVs could not be very interesting but it is. The author starts with the history of the SUV (basically the Jeep). Bradsher discusses the psychology of SUV buyers that was developed by the SUV manufacturers themselves. Because SUVs are so impractical for most people psychology is the only logical explanation for the popularity of these monstrosities.

The subtitle of this book is "The World's Most Dangerous Vehicles and How They Got That Way" and Bradsher spends a lot of time discussing how SUVs have managed to avoid government regulation that would make them much safer vehicles for both their occupants and other drivers. He discusses the rollover dangers and lack of crumple zones. Because SUVs either crumple very little or don't crumple at all in a collision SUV occupants feel the full force and energy of a crash, causing injuries that would not occur if they were in a car instead.

Cars are subject to bumper height requirements but SUVs are not. The high bumpers on SUVs are deadly to occupants of cars when hit from the side by the front of an SUV. The bumper will crush the door hitting the person in the car in the head and upper body guaranteeing death or serious injury. If you own an SUV or are thinking about buying one please read this book, so you can learn how you are endangering yourself, your family, your fellow road users and the environment. If you don't go off road or haul trailers buy a car or minivan instead.

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Summary: But It Makes Me Feel Powerful
Review: In this book, veteran New York Times journalist, Keith Bradsher provides one of the most comprehensive and brutally honest reports on the massive station wagons improperly named sport utility vehicles (SUVs). Bradsher spent years researching his subject when he served as the New York Times' Detroit Bureau chief. In this capacity, Badsher was as plugged in to the upper echelons of the American auto industry as anyone could be. When Bradsher began research on SUVs he found that many auto industry employees-especially engineers-we're completely willing to disclose their honest opinions about the design flaws and safety hazards of these oversized station wagons. Even auto executives who did not like Bradsher and his research topic were compelled to talk to him since he covered important events in their trade.

It is important to remember, as another reviewer pointed out that practically none of the findings in this book are Bradsher's own; instead there are a recapitulation things the auto makers said themselves. For example, in the chapter entitled "Reptilian Dreams" Bradsher quotes the findings of auto industry market researchers who determined that typical SUV drivers "tend to be people who are insecure and vain. They are frequently nervous about their marriages and uncomfortable about parenthood. They often lack confidence in their driving skills. Above all, they are apt to be self-centered and self-absorbed, with little interest in their neighbors or communities." The sad implication of this statement is that according to the automakers (not Bradsher-this is the auto makers talking), if you buy an SUV then there's a good chance that you possess an obnoxious personality and are fundamentally timid and insecure beneath the surface.

Much of the market research performed by the automakers, according to Bradsher, focused on the most basic archetypal images with which human beings associate various emotions. As a result of their findings, the automakers patterned SUVs after the archetypal image of a monster with a large rounded body, eyes (large headlights), and teeth (the grill). One of the most primitive human emotions, according to the automakers' researchers is the urge to be ensconced within the safety of a monster-one that makes us feel much more powerful than we actually are.

Bradsher also sites the automakers' own statistics in his discussion of the horrible safety record of SUVs. Not only are these enormous station wagons dangerous to occupants of other vehicles, but to their own as well. Because of their high center of gravity and poor brakes (SUVs use the drum brakes of light trucks, not the disk brakes of cars), SUVs are much more likely to roll over than smaller vehicles of mini vans. Ironically, while the size of an SUV might make drivers feel safe it actually puts them in much greater danger of death, whiplash, and spinal injuries. Those quaint little guardrails that we see on America's highways were designed to bounce cars back on the road when they veer off course. Since they were not designed for SUVs, they unfortunately have the adverse effect of tipping these portly station wagons over upon impact.

One of the saddest of Bradsher's conclusions is that SUVs are inadvertently fueling an arms race on the road. As the drivers of non-excessive vehicles experience being blinded by SUV headlights, or crushed by SUV collisions, they are becoming increasingly compelled to purchase SUVs themselves as a matter of survival. As a result, Bradsher argues SUVs increasingly dominate the roadways and it is only a matter of time before they compel drivers who are not insecure and self-hating to purchase their own obese station wagons in order to increase the odds of survival during a collision.

SUVs, as Bradsher notes, are filled with irony. Many people use or fantasize of using SUVs as off road vehicles when in fact these corpulent station wagons are responsible for much environmental destruction. (All of the oil to be extracted from the proposed Alaska National Wildlife Refuge will cover the extra fuel consumed by SUVs.) Furthermore, many drivers of these plump family wagons view them as emblems of freedom when in fact they owe their continued existence to protectionism. The American government heavily subsidizes these vehicles at home and blocks any significant import of safer, more fuel efficient SUVs from abroad. These are, as Bradsher's research implies more a product of corporate welfare than of free trade or choice.

And perhaps the most perverse aspect of SUVs is the manner in which many drivers view them as patriotic vehicles, even going so far as to sport American flags while lumbering along the road way. But as Bill Maher, Arianna Huffington, and others point out, these pork shaped wagons vastly increase America's dependence on foreign oil which has at least two disastrous consequences: (1) more oil wars, and (2) indirectly funding terrorism. As Bill Maher points out in "When You Ride Alone You Ride with Bin Laden", much of the extra fuel consumed by SUVs greatly enriches members of the Saudi Government and royal family, some of whom are known to have financed anti-American terrorists or the alleged charities from which they draw their funding.

Days after I read this book a colleague of mine narrowly escaped death when his car was sideswiped by an SUV. He told me that the roads were too dangerous to drive a non-excessive vehicle and that in order to survive he too planned to buy a bovine station wagon.

Rating:
Summary: SUVs are No Safer, So Opt Out of the Highway Arms Race
Review: Keith Bradsher's lively, lucid and fascinating new book on sport utility vehicles is a major milestone and wake-up call for automotive safety. Bradsher shows how these gas-guzzling highway behemoths arose from a long history of special deals for the domestic automotive industry in the form of import taxes, subsidies and countless regulatory loopholes, with automakers left off the hook for everything from miles-per-gallon and emissions standards to safety protections.

The tragic result of this piling-on of self-dealing and special favors, as well as the industry's SUV marketing juggernaut, is the spread of this most dangerous vehicle, which fails to protect its own occupants and poses a serious menace to others on the road. The loopholes also create an SUV cash cow for automakers, who are able to cut corners -- manufacturing shoddy vehicles on existing pickup-truck chassis -- and to grossly increase profits in the absence of rules requiring even basic safety and environmental features.

In producing these pickups masquerading as yuppie fantasy vehicles, the automakers neglected years of highway safety research and created vehicles deliberately designed to look boxy, macho and frightening. But, in a crash, the high bumper, stiff frame and steel-beam construction of SUVs override cars and roadside guardrails. By failing to absorb crash energy or to crumple as they should, they can ram into other motorists and shock their own occupants' bodies. And their high, tippy design and weak roofs place SUV drivers at risk of death or paralysis in a rollover crash.

As if this body count were not enough, the proliferation of SUVs is also a disaster for the environment. Because of the weak rules governing fuel economy and emissions standards for light trucks, the explosion of SUVs has begun to turn back the clock on recent pollution reductions, including emissions of carbon dioxide, which causes global warming. Bradsher documents the enormous, undue influence of automakers and their unions on Capitol Hill, showing how the industry blocked new regulations over and over again.

Bradsher also points out that as SUVs start to flood the used-car market and new SUV sales increase, the next wave of consequences will be even more devastating. In this spreading highway "arms race," more consumers may feel they must compete by up-sizing the vehicles they buy, and less experienced drivers will be behind the wheel of these hard-to-handle trucks. So don't believe the auto industry's hype on SUVs, or its attempts to squash the truth-telling in this important book. As years of work at Public Citizen promoting automotive safety has shown us, no issue will be more critical to shaping the future of safety on our roads.

Bradsher, a Pulitzer-prize winning New York Times reporter with a years of experience covering Detroit, chronicles this growing debacle in an accessible, clear and impeccably informed style. His book is the clarion call necessary to continue the drive toward safety begun by Ralph Nader in Unsafe At Any Speed, and is a must-read for anyone concerned about this massive step backward and the real and deadly costs of American's new highway narcissism.

-- Laura MacCleery
Counsel for Auto Safety and Regulatory Affairs, Public Citizen

Rating:
Summary: Reptiles rule! Road warriors in the automotive arms race ...
Review: Like handguns, sport utility vehicles represent a major cultural faultline in America today. In this brilliant book, �High and Mighty, SUVs: The World�s Most Dangerous Vehicles and How They Got That Way,� Keith Bradsher clearly explains why the SUV has become so controversial. In the process, he makes a convincing case for discouraging anyone from ever choosing to buy or drive one of these so-called �light trucks.�

First of all, however, it must be said that SUVs tend to arouse powerful emotions and bring out the worst in people on both sides of the debate. Those against SUVs often adopt an infuriating tone of sanctimonious self-righteousness and moral superiority on the subject. On the other hand, SUV enthusiasts frequently seem unwilling or unable to accept the unpleasant facts about their cherished, monster-sized chariots.

For the record, I am horrified by how much SUVs contribute to air pollution, the consumption of our natural resources, and the safety hazards on our roads, but I also have friends who own SUVs. And while I would never want one myself, I respect their freedom to have a different opinion. This is something many SUV opponents apparently fail to understand. It is just plain stupid for The Detroit Project to air asinine TV commercials that equate driving an SUV with sponsoring international terrorism. You cannot guilt-trip people into changing their behavior.

This is where �High and Mighty� performs such a great service. It is an excellent and even-handed work. Rather than merely preaching to the converted, Bradsher puts forth a balanced and persuasive argument that appeals to the reader�s common sense. As a former �New York Times� bureau chief in Detroit, Bradsher developed valuable contacts within the American automobile industry, and he goes out of his way to be fair to the many chief executives, mechanical engineers, and marketers he so carefully cultivated as sources.

Critics who condemn this book as being biased or one-sided are revealing more about their own insecurity than accurately describing the author�s commitment to professional standards of journalism. Yes, it is true that Bradsher espouses a particular point of view (and it is obvious that he considers SUVs an ecological and public health menace), but he also gives the Big Three automakers credit where credit is due. For example, he devotes an entire chapter to covering how Ford chairman Bill Ford tried to clean up the fuel emissions and improve the gas mileage of his company�s SUVs, only to find his efforts derailed when �The Ford Explorer-Firestone Tire Debacle� exploded in his face and brought an abrupt end to his good intentions.

Indeed, the reviewers who accuse Bradsher of having a liberal ax to grind should surely be honest enough to admit that he reserves some of his most scathing criticism for environmentalist tree-huggers. According to Bradsher, the environmentalists are more or less a loosely organized demographic of dilettantes and hypocrites who mean well but are incapable of helping to solve the problems caused by SUVs.

He essentially says that groups like the Sierra Club were slow to recognize and respond to the destructive impact of these vehicles because: 1) many of their own members drive them and they were reluctant to alienate their own people; 2) young �Green� activists would rather pay lip-service to their trendy cause in glamorous big cities like New York and Washington, DC than watch what the manufacturers of SUVs are doing in provincial Detroit; and 3) they are too fond of technological quick fixes (such as electric cars) that are unlikely to have practical applications anytime soon.

Unfortunately, SUV die-hards appear not to want to be confused with facts. One of the most interesting parts of �High and Mighty� is the chapter called �Reptile Dreams,� where Bradsher uses the auto industry�s own psychological profiles of the �typical� customer who purchases an SUV. It is not a pretty picture. Generally speaking, the market for these �light trucks� is composed of people who place appearance over practicality and style over substance. Although certainly not true of everyone who gets an SUV, this impression would seem to be borne out by the the increasingly menacing designs of the bigger vehicles and the overheated language many SUV owners use to defend them.

For instance, as with gun nuts, a lot of SUV fans love to talk endlessly about their �right� to drive (or �shoot�) whatever they want, but you never hear them acknowledge their concomitant responsibilities to their community or to the other people around them. This is an ultimately unsustainable approach to life in a civilized society and it raises disturbing questions about the future of our country.

Bradsher is basically a business reporter at heart, though, and he leaves these troubling implications largely unexplored. He talks at length about how SUVs are accidents waiting to happen (among other reasons, because they are so tall that they block the view of the car drivers and pedestrians behind them), but he does not recommend any actions that could be taken to reduce the popularity of these vehicles. On the contrary, Bradsher grimly refers to the paradox of �network externalities� (best defined by the old adage, �If you can�t beat �em, join �em�) in which he speculates that the number of SUVs on the road may soon reach such a critical mass that people break down and buy one just out of sheer survival instinct or a desire to conform.

Americans like their vehicles to be as big as possible, and now the logical consequences of that mentality are proving more lethal than ever. In that context, �High and Mighty� is a meticulously researched and well written warning about how corporate greed, misguided regulatory loopholes, and consumer vanity combine to keep traffic fatalities so depressingly common. For anyone with an open mind, this book will be a refreshing change from the commercial cheerleading of most of the automotive press. �High and Mighty� is 468 pages of subversion that challenges the conventional wisdom of �bigger is better� and will make you reconsider what you drive and why.

Rating:
Summary: Inconvenient for SUV folks, but solid nonetheless
Review: Like other high-raters, I'm not persuaded by Bradsher on every point. Sometimes he describes SUV design progress in ways that are quite reassuring, even in the middle of arguments for the SUV's poor safety. A passage about Expedition braking distances ends with Ford's admission and a promise to do better, and some other quoted SUV distances are only 8 or 11 feet more than regulation (that's half a car-length, though--a collision!). But overall, "High and Mighty" is a reasoned, clear-headed book, well-researched and told in plain, straight-forward language. It is full of quotations from auto execs and engineers, researchers, and even the words of auto magazines--and they themselves, the SUV makers, are saying all of the things that the make the one-star reviewers violently angry, things about rollover odds, centers of gravity, dangerous after-market grille guards, fuel efficiency, Americans buying huge cars to make up for poor driving (page 107), even the dictates of SUV fashion. When Bradsher asks Ford's truck engineering director why there's a huge excess of headroom in some SUV's and full-sized pickups, the director responds, "In Texas, you have to be able to wear your cowboy hat" (page 245). Ah, utility!

I found especially interesting the chapters "Reptile Dreams" (about how auto makers used research and interviews to suit their cars to a vain, safety-ignorant clique) and "Trouble for Cities" (about the ludicrous incompatability between SUV's and their biggest markets, the big urban centers). And Bradsher has other valid warnings, like how aging SUV's will flood the used car market in years to come, filling our highways with large, ungainly, unbalanced, and mechanically aging heavyweights not up to the rigors of day-to-day driving. Problems even he admits are being worked out in the last year or so will persist as those older SUV's--the majority--are sold used. The chapter called "The Next Drivers of SUV's," about SUV-hungry teenagers, makes those used bombers a terrifying prospect.

In sum, while the book is deeply critical of SUV's, it is not groundlessly so. Indeed, one low-rating reader says Bradsher blew a chance to write something as good as Fast-Food Nation, and I would say Bradsher actually came very close.

As of January 26, 2004, two thirds of the reader reviews for this eye-opening book are (properly, I think) four and five star reviews. The rest are basically vehement, wounded defenses of the SUV from the standpoint of violence, ignorance, and the very sort of festering self-absorbtion that the SUV's makers say populate their giddily manipulated market-base. As a reviewer below has noted, Bradsher is quoting the auto industry's own research about SUV buyers' strange admixture of ego and insecurity. Bradsher isn't posing his own guesses about SUV owner personality, but rather quoting the very guys who sell SUV's to America. One angry one-star reviewer tells Bradsher to listen to auto engineers and do some real research: this reader obviously has not read the book (or even opened it randomly) or even its press, for Bradsher did exactly that, spoke to many times more engineers and auto chiefs than any of us could possibly name, and for many years. Many of the low-reviewers just fall back on long-winded, self-righteous, poisonous rhetoric, which is ironic since those reviewers swear the book itself is unforgivably guilty of being poisonously and self-righteously political. Their SUV defenses are as devoid of real (versus merely assertive) supporting details as they hilariously accuse the book of being. One reviewer actually fantasizes Bradsher standing in front of his SUV, ripe for the killing.

Such nauseating responses do not disprove the case, though; they only prove how necessary this book is, and what the government and regulators and even the auto industry itself are up against.

Rating:
Summary: eye-opener
Review: This a very well written book. It is great reading, hard to put down. I highly recommend buying it or checking it out of the library (you might have to wait - the book is popular).

Keith Bradsher intelligently shows how anomalies in both legal regulations and the marketplace allowed the proliferation of the modern SUVs. While there are legitimate uses and users of SUV's capabilities, most people don't buy them to go off-roading, haul boats, etc. The author reveals the marketing thinking of the SUV makers. He also writes about the safety hazards SUVs pose for their occupants and other drivers; this is combined with demographic analysis that shows, among other things, how in the future a wave of cheap second-hand SUVs will fall in the hands of unsafe drivers (teens, young males, drunks) which will deepen the saefty hazards. Environmental hazards are not overlooked. The financial impact, through insurance rates, of SUVs on the drivers of other types of vehicles is examined in depth. How magazine reviews of SUVs are written (and how companies pamper journalists) is also explained. There are tons of quotes from auto industry executives and engineers, and there are references to scientific research.

Overall, this book presents a very thorough analysis of the SUV phenomenon: history, legality, environment, safety, finances, politics, marketing, cultural trends, future, etc. This is some of the best non-fiction in recent memory. Read it. It won't disappoint you.