Month: February 2020

I don't know how I happened across it, but the other day I was reading an article about the imminent demise of the Chicago Auto Show, and the author was commenting about the rise of the large electric SUVs that seem to be the new paradigm of American automobiles. He linked to an article on VICE that I found very interesting.

Quoting at length from the original article:

The picture painted of prospective SUV buyers was perhaps the most unflattering portrait of the American way of life ever devised. It doubled as a profound and lucid critique of the American ethos, one that has only gained sharper focus in the years since. And that portrait is largely the result of one consultant who worked for Chrysler, Ford, and GM during the SUV boom: Clotaire Rapaille.

Rapaille, a French emigree, believed the SUV appealed—at the time to mostly upper-middle class suburbanites—to a fundamental subconscious animalistic state, our "reptilian desire for survival," as relayed by Bradsher. ("We don't believe what people say," the website for Rapaille's consulting firm declares. Instead, they use "a unique blend of biology, cultural anthropology and psychology to discover the hidden cultural forces that pre-organize the way people behave towards a product, service or concept"). Americans were afraid, Rapaille found through his exhaustive market research, and they were mostly afraid of crime even though crime was actually falling and at near-record lows. As Bradsher wrote, "People buy SUVs, he tells auto executives, because they are trying to look as menacing as possible to allay their fears of crime and other violence." They, quite literally, bought SUVs to run over "gang members" with, Rapaille found.

Perhaps this sounds farfetched, but the auto industry's own studies agreed with this general portrait of SUV buyers. Bradsher described that portrait, comprised of marketing reports from the major automakers, as follows:

Who has been buying SUVs since automakers turned them into family vehicles? They 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 evolution of the SUV from rugged military cosplay to the vehicle for everyone can be seen in its most potent form with the H2, which sanded down the H1's rough edges while retaining the hulking figure and bestial attributes.

SUVs don't just cost society time. They cost lives. At the height of the original SUV boom in 2004, SUV occupants were 11 percent more likely to die in a crash than people in cars, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, despite the common conception that people in bigger vehicles are safer. According to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, from 1993-2003, car and SUV occupants in vehicles between one and three years old died at roughly similar rates; Bradsher explains in great detail this was because SUVs were inherently more dangerous due largely to deadly rollovers, but the higher position and stiffer frame of SUVs made them more dangerous to other road users, especially those in smaller cars, which evened out the death rate.

SUVs are more deadly for pedestrians, too. Last year, the Detroit Free Press revealed "the SUV revolution is a key, leading cause of escalating pedestrian deaths nationwide, which are up 46 percent since 2009," affecting minorities in urban areas at a disproportionately high rate. And that's without the threat of a silent Hummer accelerating to 60 miles per hour in three seconds.

Since then, SUVs have become safer for the people inside of them thanks to better design and a lower risk of rollovers. But they're still dangerous to others. Starting in 2004 and continuing through 2018, the most recent year for which data is available, car occupants die at more than double the rate of SUV occupants.

In other words, buying an SUV makes you more likely to kill other people, and yet people buy them in ever-increasing numbers. Rapaille's reptilian brain concept has surpassed marketing theory and become a real-world experiment about how much Americans value the lives of others: not very much.

The entire article is fascinating and worth your time, for it points out monster SUVs are not just basic penis extenders as generally believed, but also speak of a profound—for lack of a better word, sickness—in American society today; something obvious to anyone paying attention.