Unsafe at any speed

For example, the new Hummer ads: "Teach cabbies some respect." What message is that? It's a fake New Yorker cartoon with somebody grinning fiendishly at the wheel of his Hummer. A taxicab is on each side with taxi drivers looking up sideways in terror at that SUV. You shouldn't be using your vehicle to teach cabbies or anybody else respect.

Do you think Hummers are going to be popular?

They already are.

How much do they cost?

$50,000 for the Hummer H2, $100,000 for the original models that are just modified military Humvees. GM plans to sell nearly as many of them each year as they sell Cadillacs. This is the first new GM division since Saturn. It says something about where our country has gone that in the late '80s we were so concerned about energy conservation and the environment that we came out with a division like Saturn dedicated to both. And now we come up with this sort of paramilitary vehicle that is a real menace to other motorists. GM says it will be marketed most heavily in Manhattan and Los Angeles because those are the markets that have the most households with incomes over $150,000. They're not marketing this for people in Montana.

What will they do to traffic in some place in Manhattan?

They will make it ever harder to see where you're going. They'll make it ever more difficult to back out of parking spaces. One advantage at least in Manhattan is that you won't have blinding headlights coming in your direction because so many of the roads are one way.

The overall death rate for full-size SUVs -- Suburbans, Expeditions, Navigators -- is 8 percent higher than the death rate in full-size cars and minivans. We could be safer if we stuck to full-size cars and minivans, and we certainly could make everybody else safer. You really don't want to be hit by a Hummer H2 when you're in a car.

SUVs are also gas guzzlers. Arianna Huffington brought this up in a recent column. If we do go to war against Iraq, could it affect the popularity of the SUV?

I'm not holding my breath. In the last Persian Gulf war, SUV sales were up. The Explorer and Blazer had just come out, which would naturally explain good sales, but they did extremely well even as gas prices soared. The high-income families who are the main market for SUVs tend not to worry about gas prices. Fuel economy is not a big concern for new vehicle buyers these days. That's particularly true because middle-class families increasingly buy these very reliable used vehicles that Detroit is now making. And so what ends up in the nation's vehicle fleet is increasingly decided by the top 20 or 30 percent of the income distribution, which in many cases could care less about gas prices.

Overall, our gas consumption is still rising. I was in Osaka, Japan, two weeks ago and I covered the OPEC oil meeting for the New York Times. There are two things that OPEC is excited about these days -- two bright spots on an otherwise dismal horizon. 1) The Chinese economy is growing 7 or 8 percent per year and they're trying to switch from coal to oil. 2) American gasoline consumption. The secretary general of OPEC said that it's a real growth area for them. He attributed it partly to the fact that people are driving instead of flying after Sept. 11. But the other factor is that the average fuel economy of new vehicles going on the nation's roads has been declining steadily since 1987 and '88. It's been declining because even though the technology for individual models has improved their fuel economy, we're switching so many people from cars to SUVs, and SUVs get a low gas mileage average.

Where is the environmental movement on this now?

They are fighting very hard on SUVs. The movement has tried very hard to raise fuel economy requirements for SUVs; they successfully lobbied the EPA in 1999 to require that SUVs meet the same standards as cars. That will happen by 2009. They are very much paying attention to SUVs now. They were somewhat late on the uptake, but they -- like everybody, including the auto industry -- didn't realize just how big this boom would become.

The auto industry was surprised in the 1970s that people liked them so much, right?

Everyone was surprised, even through the 1990s. I can remember, when I was sent out to Detroit at the end of 1995, one of my editors said we should keep an eye out for the peak in the SUV boom because any long-term trend you would think would come to a peak. But they just kept going up and up.

To some extent, it's because SUVs create their own demand. There's an economic theory called network externalities, which is the idea that you'll get a benefit from using what other people are using even if it's not a better product. In this case, if you drive an SUV, you can still see something on the road [because you can see better around all the other SUVs, whereas in a car you are at a disadvantage]. But it's not a better product.

Do you do expect them to get more and more popular?

The sheer number of models and the sheer number of factories that have been converted to SUV production guarantees that they will be an enormous part of the market. I do know that the proportion of registered vehicles in the U.S. on the nation's road that are SUVs is going to go up dramatically. There's not a lot of old SUVs out there to scrap but there are a lot of old cars out there to scrap.

We have barely seen the beginnings of the SUV boom. They will become more than twice as common on the nation's roads -- guaranteed -- within five or 10 years.

• View blog reactions