Unsafe at any speed

At this point, though, it seems as if SUVs are sneered at and joked about. You referred to a Randy Cohen ("The Ethicist") column in the New York Times magazine. Cohen completely attacked a letter writer who was asking about whether he should drive an SUV. I'm sure the New York Times magazine is read by a lot of SUV drivers. Do you think this general negative attitude will eventually penetrate?

It sure hasn't yet. SUVs are still rising in sales. The fact is that to some extent SUVs create their own demand. They are so tall and bulky and menacing-looking that other people feel like they need to be in an SUV. They can't see down the road anymore because the big tall vehicles are blocking the way; they can't see around them; it's getting harder to back out of a parking space; the headlights are absolutely blinding at night.

Even if the sales were to level off, you would see far more SUVs on the road five to 10 years from now. The reason is that right now pickup-based SUVs are about 19 percent of the new vehicle market and then another 8 percent of the market are these car-based or crossover SUVs. So 27 percent of the market is SUVs. Only 2 or 3 percent of the vehicles scrapped each year are SUVs. As long as those two are mismatched, you're going to see a rising percentage of all the vehicles on the road being SUVs. SUVs are rising by nearly a full percentage point per year, which in automotive terms is huge. To do it over 10 years really makes a difference in the appearance of the American road.

You basically say that an SUV is just a pickup truck with a lot of fancy trimming. Can you explain? What exactly is an SUV?

The SUV evolved from pickup trucks. In fact, the first SUV was the Suburban, way back in 1935. GM didn't even keep the records of the development of that first Suburban. Chevy didn't keep them either. Why? Because at the time, it was very much viewed as simply another variation on a Chevy pickup. SUVs, until very recently with the advent of crossover utility vehicles, tended to be a pickup with a longer passenger compartment and an extra couple rows of seats bolted onto an existing previously designed underbody.

And are they relatively inexpensive to make?

SUVs are very inexpensive to make. It's not like building a car where you've got to get all these pieces to fit together just right. SUVs are built the way cars were actually made through the '50s and '60s. Then, as cars became more sophisticated and people demanded better performance as well as better gas mileage, the cars moved toward a unitized body architecture design in which all of the pieces fit together and formed more of a lattice.

By contrast, it's very cheap to simply bolt different variations of passenger compartments on top of a very simple ladder-frame underbody, which is what you get from pickup trucks. It is enormously profitable. You're taking a $20,000 work truck, you're adding several thousand dollars' worth of extra seats and a longer passenger compartment, you're adding several thousand dollars' worth of chrome and extra sound insulation and you're selling it for $50,000.

That's where the auto industry gets almost all of its profits. As a result, I do say in the book that you need to be a little careful about how quickly you change the SUV market. This is an underpinning of the United States economy comparable to the Internet or the software industry.

You pointed out that this was an underreported aspect of the 1990s boom economy: The auto industry totally blossomed, and because of the SUV.

Exactly. People need to remember that GM and Ford each have seven times the sales of the Microsoft Corp. GM and Ford are each 1 percent or more of the U.S. economy. Their domestic operations alone are each bigger than the entire worldwide operations of the entire American airline industry. They're bigger than AT&T plus Microsoft plus IBM. These are the cornerstones of the American economy, and because of the success of the SUVs in the 1990s, they were able to continue paying very generous labor contracts to the United Auto Workers union, which spread that prosperity rather broadly through the upper Midwest. As I say in the book, the median home prices in Detroit rose three times as fast as the national average through the 1990s.

If they were forced to change some of the things that are wrong -- or comply with some federal regulations that you think they should be complying with -- would it really affect their profits that much?

Two questions there. 1) How did they get this way? American Motors bought Jeep in 1970, then struggled to meet the new federal safety and environmental regulations that were taking effect. In 1973, the Environmental Protection Agency decided to label Jeeps as nonpassenger vehicles because otherwise American Motors was going to have to stop selling them. Nonpassenger vehicles, or trucks, didn't have to meet the same air pollution standards, and American Motors just didn't have the engineering capability to build catalytic converters of its own. So rather than have the demise of American Motors be blamed on the EPA, or on the Clean Air Act, the EPA said, "OK, they're nonpassenger vehicles." SUVs have been regulated as trucks ever since. The same goes for the safety regulations and the fuel economy regulations.

How difficult would it be to comply now with car standards as opposed to truck standards?

That varies very much from regulation to regulation. Some of the regulations would not be that tough. For example, the Clinton administration in December 1999 ordered that SUVs meet the same air pollution standards as cars by 2009 model year. Right now, SUVs pollute five and a half times as much per mile as the cars. Brake standards are becoming a little more stringent. Things like rollover protection ... it would cost somewhat more to strengthen the roofs and also you would have to lower the center of gravity of SUVs to make them less rollover prone. You might also put in a lot of this anti-rollover technology; that tends to add maybe $500 to $1,000 per vehicle.

Anti-rollover technology?

You've got sensors now, which are unfortunately only on a handful of models, which is absurd, but they actually detect tilt in the vehicle and apply the brake to one wheel. That can reduce the likelihood of rollover. But you're still going to flip over if you're hitting a guardrail and you're too tall for the guardrail.

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