Unsafe at any speed

The biggest, toughest rule of all, and the one that has really allowed the SUVs to flourish, is the fuel economy standard. That's a really tough one to fix. There are things the automakers could do to improve the fuel economy of their SUVs. They have not invested in the engine technology; right now, most cars have four valves per cylinder and a lot of the SUVs don't. There are steps that can't readily be taken overnight but over five or seven or 10 or 12 years, you could bring SUVs up to the current level of fuel economy for cars.

My impression is that they really haven't been under that much pressure to make some of these changes.

No, they haven't. Among other things, the auto industry has been able to avoid some of the rules simply by making the vehicles bigger. If you make an SUV big enough, it qualifies for lenient air pollution rules, and if you make it really large, like the larger Suburbans or the Hummers or the Ford Excursions, they're exempt from fuel economy standards entirely. That's how you get these Excursions lumbering along at eight or 10 miles to the gallon.

Is that why they keep getting bigger? Or is it the demand?

It's both. There's another advantage for the full-size SUVs. If you get a vehicle that weighs more than 6,000 pounds when fully loaded, then it is subject to more lenient environmental rules and it can be written off against your taxes. It's a big loophole in the American tax code. If you're a realtor and you buy a luxury car, you can only write off the first $17,500 of its value against your taxes and only over five years. That's a pretty limited deduction if you're buying a $50,000 car. If you buy a $50,000 or $75,000 luxury SUV that's over 6,000 gross vehicle weight, you write off the whole thing. It's a rule written for farmers to write off farm equipment, but any light truck qualifies and all these SUVs do. It's an example of how the federal government, with lots of lobbying from the auto industry, has tilted the playing field against cars and in favor of less safe, less efficient, more polluting vehicles like the SUV.

And there are many reasons why the government doesn't want to mess with the auto industry, and it's not just campaign contributions.

Well, it's votes. This is a very important industry to what has really become the most politically important part of the country. The battleground for the 2000 election, and in fact for most of the elections of the last 40 years, tends to be decided by who can win Michigan, Ohio and to some extent Pennsylvania. Michigan and Ohio are really states where your views on autos count. Your views on fuel economy count.

Bill Clinton endorsed much higher fuel economy standards with Al Gore early in the campaign in 1992. And he was battered for it with TV ads in Michigan and Ohio. On a visit to Michigan in August of 1992 he declared that he would pursue whatever was feasible and would help the industry come up with something feasible. What that turned into was no increase in fuel economy standards during the Clinton administration and something on the order of a billion dollars plus in subsidies to the industry to do research on better fuel-efficient technologies. Did any of that improve actual fuel efficiency? No. It allowed the automakers to make ever more powerful vehicles, ever-heavier vehicles and still meet the same fuel economy standards.

Let's go back to rollovers and this myth of SUV safety. It will probably come as a surprise that you say that they are not safer than cars.

As a class there is no question that SUVs are less safe in terms of rollovers than cars are. If you look at the federal government's rollover ratings, there are no pickup-based SUVs that get more than three stars on a scale of one to five. Full-size cars get five stars, minivans get four stars.

They partially make up the difference by killing the other guy in vehicle-to-vehicle crashes, but they don't do well enough in vehicle-to-vehicle crashes to offset the rollovers. People have a myth about the rollovers, which makes matters worse. Everyone thinks that rollovers happen to bad drivers and no one thinks he is a bad driver. And so as a result people underestimate the risk that they are going to make a mistake that results in a rollover. They don't understand that 90 percent of rollovers occur not because somebody's zig-zagging on a paved road but because the vehicle was tripped -- whether by striking a guardrail or a curb or a low-riding vehicle.

And that brings me to the next one, which is the myth of four-wheel drive. Four-wheel drive helps you accelerate on slick surfaces but that's about it. But it really doesn't help you to control your car better? I was pretty shocked about that.

And you didn't know that four-wheel drive doesn't help you brake?

Nope. Well, I just had the impression that four-wheel drive was better all around.

You are an excellent example. There are plenty of people in Detroit who say the customers must know about this stuff, but they don't. It's not true [that four-wheel drive aids braking], and the safety engineers acknowledge that that's a problem. In fact, the car driver who goes slipping and sliding down the road knows that he's having trouble, that the traction isn't great. The SUV driver, as long as he's accelerating, has no problem. But he doesn't know that he's not going to be able to stop until he tries to hit the brakes -- and that's a real recipe for trouble. It's a vehicle that fosters overconfidence.

My friend reads car magazines religiously -- I thought he knew everything about cars -- and he always told me that four-wheel drive helps in the rain.

That's exactly it! I criticize the car magazines in my book. Car magazines should be telling people that you can't drive an SUV the way you drive a car. They should be telling people that four-wheel drive does not help you stop, it only helps you go faster. People don't understand that.

Next Page: If you love your teenagers, keep them out of SUVs

• View blog reactions