Road Killers

The New Yorker

Posted 2004-01-05

This week in the magazine, in “Big and Bad,” Malcolm Gladwell writes about S.U.V. safety. Here, with The New Yorker’s Ben Greenman, Gladwell discusses the boom of the S.U.V. culture, and whether S.U.V.s are as safe as drivers feel in them.

BEN GREENMAN: You mention that people are more concerned with feeling safe than with being safe, and that this results in the popularity of limited-feedback, poorly performing vehicles like S.U.V.s. Are there other examples of this S.U.V. culture, like McMansions and so forth?

MALCOLM GLADWELL: There are. Part of it has to do with what marketers call “overperformance”—the idea that there is a growing gap between the technical characteristics of a product and its real-world use. So people wear thousand-dollar mountain-climbing jackets to go to the store, or they type (as I am doing now) on a laptop computer that is capable of running a Pentagon war game. Technology in many areas has now gone beyond the actual requirements of use, so we’ve dissociated the two in our minds. The problem with S.U.V.s, of course, is that there’s a dissociation between their sheer size and their off-road qualities and how they actually perform on the road. That has real-world consequences.

One school of thought says that S.U.V. buyers harbor a kind of outdoorsy fantasy. But I suspect that it’s more basic than that: this is a vehicle that can flourish in the most extreme environment imaginable. If it can ford streams and climb over boulders, just think how safe and protected you’ll be on the trip to Wal-Mart! Of course, the logic behind that argument is backward: the trip to Wal-Mart is a good deal more hazardous than fording a stream in the wilderness, and we ought to be buying cars optimized for the conditions we actually drive in.

Market research shows that S.U.V.s tend to be bought by people who are "insecure, vain, self-centered, and self-absorbed, who are frequently nervous about their marriages, and who lack confidence in their driving skills." But isn't this what people said about sports cars for many years?

Well, it’s not quite what people said about sports cars: for example, I think the people who buy sports cars have excessive confidence in their driving skills. But, in general, the more expensive an item becomes, the more psychological factors play into the purchase decision.

Even with the immense popularity of S.U.V.s, they don't sell themselves. How is the auto industry marketing them?

There’s a television commercial for an S.U.V. in which a woman is driving the S.U.V. and a rock rolls onto the road in front of her, and she swerves around it at the last minute. That ad claims that S.U.V.s are nimble, and suggests that the key variable in avoiding the rock was the vehicle. That is an attempt, it seems to me, to play to the driver who lacks confidence in his or her skills. The most dominant image in S.U.V. commercials and ads is still the S.U.V. mastering some off-road obstacle: fording streams, cutting through snowbanks, racing across virgin wilderness. Obviously, almost no S.U.V. driver is ever going to use his or her car in those environments (in large part, of course, because racing across virgin wilderness in an S.U.V. is, for the most part, illegal). Another interesting thing about S.U.V. advertisements, along these lines, is how rarely children appear in them. Keith Bradsher makes this point in his book, “High and Mighty.” Minivans are advertised in family-centric ways. The S.U.V., on the other hand, is supposed to allow the buyer to pretend that he or she doesn’t have a family, that he or she is still a kind of rugged loner without suburban entrapments.

To what degree is the gas-guzzling aspect of S.U.V.s also a factor in people's love for the vehicles—the fact that they are perceived as big American machines with healthy appetites?

I’m not sure that the gas-mileage issue is that important either way, because gas prices are so low by historical standards right now. For someone who is buying a fifty-thousand-dollar Lincoln Navigator, an extra ten dollars at the pump isn’t that much money. The most important other issue right now, I think, is the question of fashion: that, at the moment, certain kinds of S.U.V.s (like the Cadillac Escalade) are simply considered cool, in the way that Corvettes were cool twenty-five years ago.

Does the relationship between passive safety and active safety change when the roads of the nation become lousy with S.U.V.s? In other words, when light trucks were only twenty per cent of the nation's vehicle fleet, active safety might have worked better. Does there come a point, at fifty per cent and rising, when how we judge a safe car has to change?

I would actually make the opposite case. If every car on the road was a Mini, then the cost of an accident would be quite small: if you are in a Mini and you hit a Mini, you aren’t going to be that bad off. So, in the old days, the premium on active safety wasn’t so large. On the other hand, if every car on the road is an S.U.V., the cost of an accident grows substantially. When a Ford Explorer hits a Chevy TrailBlazer, both parties suffer enormously. And, if a Ford Explorer hits a Mini, the Mini driver is a dead man. I’m more interested in active safety now than ever before. As a non-S.U.V. owner, I simply cannot afford to get into any accident at all these days.

Just recently, there was news of a "historic voluntary commitment" by the auto industry to make S.U.V.s safer. It involves changing the design in ways that will supposedly reduce the chance of death for car drivers colliding with S.U.V.s or trucks by twenty-eight per cent. Is this a good way of addressing the problem, or a side step?

I think it’s an excellent start. I don’t think we can easily cure people of their desire to feel safe—even if that desire does not correlate with actual safety. But what we can do—and ought to do—is limit the damage that that obsession does to others. The important thing to remember is that the harm that S.U.V.s do to other vehicles is not a simple function of their excessive weight. In other words, if a five-thousand-pound S.U.V. hits you, you aren’t automatically dead. Cars are so beautifully designed these days that they can safely absorb tremendous forces in an accident. (I always think of the fact that the bodyguard in the front seat of Princess Diana’s Mercedes survived that crash, which was into a concrete pillar reportedly at a speed in excess of ninety miles per hour. That’s how good car safety has become.) But all those safety mechanisms usually work if the car is hit squarely (or, at least, on the same plane) by the opposing vehicle. That’s what is not happening now. S.U.V.s are so tall that cars simply submarine them. The kind of redesign that the automakers are talking about—making S.U.V.s less “aggressive” in their accident posture and reducing the risks of that kind of submarining—is critically important. Of course, it would be better if every car on the road was the same weight. But that’s not going to happen.