Edmunds.com | Inside Line | Auto Observer Your Account | Help | Directory
You are here:
![[F]](http://a332.g.akamai.net/f/332/936/12h/www.edmunds.com/media/townhall/webxicons/site.gif){kind=small}
Forums
Wagons Station Wagon vs SUV
1426 messages, Last post on Feb 21, 2007 at 8:37 AM
You are in the Wagons Forum. Your Host is kcram
|
|
|---|---|
|
really is an issue. superior handling, braking and acceleration with an experienced, alert driver at the wheel can avoid a lot of accidents. further, one of the biggest safety issues in taller vehicles is rollover. biomechanics have confirmed there is no amount of stiffness , crumple, etc that will protect you or a passenger in a rolloever...the force of the head accelerating into the ground as the vehicle rotates loads the spine beyond anything short of diving into an empty pool, even if there is no vehicle crush...thus the fallacy of roof stiffness=greater safety. i have no issue with SUV's, only with the widespread operation of fuel guzzling behemoths, including all the new 350 hp sedans, where the utility of the vehicle is rarely if ever used or needed. i went on vacation to the beach last week and paid close attention to the vehicles on the road...guess what? by a huge majority, the vehicle most likely to be towing or car-topping cargo was a mini van, followed by a motorhome. i saw not a single towed boat, trailer, etc. behind a mercedes, BMW, lincoln, land rover, hummer or cadillac SUV, and dont even think about the new crossovers! most of the luxury SUV's dont even have hitches! likewise, in over five hundred miles of driving on the interstate, i saw no towed recreational load (excluding those towed by motorhomes)larger than a trailer with two jet skis being towed by a dodge caravan and a pop up camper with 4 bikes mounted on top towed by a toyota highlander. BTW, i had the 94 explorer with 4 bikes on the hitch-mounted bike rack,loaded to within 100 lbs of the max GVW. and the blur that raced by me in the left lane going the fastest? a ford f 150 pick up with two teenage boys aboard. a cayenne red WRX wagon passed by that made my heart yearn, but thats another story...... Mark |
|
|
Subewannabe wrote, "biomechanics have confirmed there is no amount of stiffness , crumple, etc that will protect you or a passenger in a rolloever...the force of the head accelerating into the ground as the vehicle rotates loads the spine beyond anything short of diving into an empty pool, even if there is no vehicle crush...thus the fallacy of roof stiffness=greater safety." I don't even begin to understand what you're saying. People survive rollovers all the time! Four members of my family (me included) have survived four separate rollovers over the years. One of these was in pre-seatbelt days, the others were in lap-belt-only years. The purpose of your seat/lap belt is to keep your butt on the seat so that (as long as the roof doesn't cave in) your head won't contact the roof with lethal force. In each case involving people in my family, the roof and supporting pillars succeeded in keeping the roof from collapsing. If I'm choosing between two otherwise-equally-desirable vehicles and one has a stout structure supporting the roof, while the other doesn't, I'll choose the former every day of the week, and I'll be the one with the greatest chances of surviving a rollover. - jack |
|
| Philly88's link a few posts back made the safety argument for the Station Wagons. It had a graph showing the death rates for every kind of vehicle (car, SUV, pickup) depending on their weight. The lowest death rate came for cars between 3500 and 4000lbs. Even lower than 5000+ lb SUV's. What cars are in that weight class? - station wagons. | |
|
"So lets say we started with (say) a fleet-average vehicle weight of 3,000 pounds. Some people, to gain a supposed safety advantage, start buying 4,000 lb. vehicles. Out of self-defense, others leapfrog and start buying 5,000 lb SUVs. Still others say "I don't want MY wife and kids at risk, so I'll get a 6,000 lb behemoth." After a few iterations of this INSANITY, half the population drives 8,000 pound Excursions - and so, following Philly's reasoning, the other half starts switching to Mack trucks". I think we all realize you got carried away with this argument. Ford was under the misguided assumption it might work that way, but as we all know the Excursion is limping towards the end of its day. So it does appear consumers have said enough is enough - at least in the Ford world. |
|
|
>half the population drives 8,000 pound Excursions - and so, following Philly's reasoning, the other half starts switching to Mack trucks< urmmamma replies, "I think we all realize you got carried away with this argument. Ford was under the misguided assumption it might work that way, but as we all know the Excursion is limping towards the end of its day. So it does appear consumers have said enough is enough - at least in the Ford world." It was the astonishing thought process (I'm putting my family in a Sherman tank, to he!! with yours and everybody else's, if you want to avoid being crushed by mine, go buy something even bigger) from which I was recoiling. There are all too many who somehow think that's perfectly logical. There may not have been quite enough myopic people to make an adequate market for the preposterous Excursion, but there certainly are enough for Suburbans/Expeditions/Escalades/etc. - jb |
|
|
In the NHTSA and the study I posted earlier what is the death rate between a full sized SUV and a Smaller vehicle? Because car to car is one of the most common accidents it seems more likely that the big guys will win head to head. That is not the issue. The issue is if people will be willing to give up their SUVs for wagons. Wagons do offer more room than a sedan. Wagons do handle better than a truck based SUV. But the new wagons can't haul much. With the possible exception of some of the Subaru drivers it seems to break down to. If you are a dedicated city person and you don't haul a boat, jet ski, snow mobile, or motorcycle, a wagon will do. If you don't go to the Home Depot and load up bags of cement or 700 pounds of pavers then a wagon will do. If you never plan on doing any of those things a wagon will do. And that is the problem friends. What one group thinks will do and what one group wants are not the same. Some people will draw the line at a vehicle that will do what they hope to do as long as it gets at least 15 MPG. Others will do all they can to try and get the whole family and the dogs in a vehicle that gets 30mpg. Both groups think the other one is strange. One thing is true however. SUV people are voting with their wallets and wagon people are not. Many wagon people may be sedan people and that might be the difference but Honda didn't drop the Accord wagon because wagon people bought them by the thousands. |
|
|
"One thing is true however. SUV people are voting with their wallets" And evidently the only things that might change that are fuel rationing (pump prices remain about the same, but each person gets a monthly or annual allotment of ration tickets for x gallons, and unneeded tickets can be freely sold on a secondary market for whatever they will fetch from those whose vehicles burn more than average) or exponentially-variable fuel pricing based on consumption. I will enthusiastically support either alternative. - jb |
|
|
|
|
Your proposed fuel rationing program is to accomplish what? The amount of money taxed on a gallon of gas is already in place and quite high I might add. Therefore high consumption users already pay more. If you are under the impression it will penalize SUV drivers – well that doesn’t hold up either. Many people that own SUV’s put very little mileage on their vehicle while compact owners that travel far, mostly job related, would be penalized. What about the trucking industry? If people blow their wad just to get back and forth to work, what would we do on the weekends? Stay home? I don’t think the restaurant and entertainment industry would be too pleased. Are you proposing we fly more? Do you work for an airline, ballistic? But that wouldn’t work either, as I may not have enough allocation to get me to the airport. A fuel allocation program would most certainly send our economy into a tailspin. So why ration fuel? Known reserves of oil have increased by almost 70 percent over the last 25 years, to the point where if all new exploration for oil were to stop tomorrow, the wells would not run dry for at least the next 47 years. There is also a general consensus that current conventional reserves of oil are in the area of 1,000 billion barrels. Do you know how many barrels of oil have been burned since the search for oil began in 1859? 800 billion. Indeed we are in pretty good shape - although we are burning it at a far greater clip. So reasonable conservation should be enforced. If your allocation concoction is about emissions, your battles should be waged with the folks responsible for our current technology used to curb them. |
|
|
Because the other thing SUV people will do is vote. There will be no form of fuel rationing as long as there are politicians and those politicians have any prayer of getting elected. You would never in a hundred lifetimes get enough petitions to get such a measure on the ballot and no lobby group worth its salt would abandon business to get their politicians to even introduce such a thing. At least not without a full scale war. You can see the possibility of an increase in wagon sales but will they ever approach the popularity of SUVs or even the old Mini van? Not likely unless wagons morph into crossovers. But then would they still be wagons? I don't know but wagons have changed quite a bit from when my dad had his vista Cruiser. |
|
|
|
|
is caused by the head being pushed hard into the corner of the roof as the occupant's body accelerates in a rotational vector, even faster than the vehicle , then it is in that very vulnerable position when the car comes down hard on that corner. yes, you can survive a rollover but it is mostly because of the speed and dyanmics of the roll turned out well for you, not the strength of the cab roof. last weekend's observations on returning from the beach were interesting, but it was a biased study, i.e. people going to , coming from and living at the beach. today i went the opposite direction, up into the mountains surrounding great smokies natl park. the towing winners up in the land of the sky: full size pick ups towing campers, including 5th wheel rigs. i did see one SUV, an old jeep wagoneer, towing dirt bikes on a trailer. down in the nantahala gorge, everything was car-topped , including the whitewater rafts, on everything from VW golfs to converted school busses. im still looking for the jumbo SUVS towing those 5000 lb boats. so far im seeing the SUV's but no boats. imagine that! Mark |
|
New? Join Now!
Forum Tools
Search Forums
Browse by Vehicle
Browse by Board
Browse by Topic
Today's Chats
