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Automotive News & Views Are you happy you didn't sell your SUV?
122 messages, Last post on Apr 15, 2009 at 5:57 AM
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Replying to: explorerx4 (Jan 06, 2009 5:05 pm) 
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How the S.U.V. ran over automotive safety According to Bradsher, internal industry market research concluded 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. Ford's S.U.V. designers took their cues from seeing "fashionably dressed women wearing hiking boots or even work boots while walking through expensive malls. " Toyota's top marketing executive in the United States, Bradsher writes, loves to tell the story of how at a focus group in Los Angeles "an elegant woman in the group said that she needed her full-sized Lexus LX 470 to drive up over the curb and onto lawns to park at large parties in Beverly Hills. " One of Ford's senior marketing executives was even blunter: "The only time those S.U.V.s are going to be off-road is when they miss the driveway at 3 a. m. " n a thirty-five m.p.h. crash test, for instance, the driver of a Cadillac Escalade—the G.M. counterpart to the Lincoln Navigator—has a sixteen-per-cent chance of a life-threatening head injury, a twenty-per-cent chance of a life-threatening chest injury, and a thirty-five-per-cent chance of a leg injury. The same numbers in a Ford Windstar minivan—a vehicle engineered from the ground up, as opposed to simply being bolted onto a pickup-truck frame—are, respectively, two per cent, four per cent, and one per cent. ) But this desire for safety wasn't a rational calculation. It was a feeling. Over the past decade, a number of major automakers in America have relied on the services of a French-born cultural anthropologist, G. Clotaire Rapaille, whose speciality is getting beyond the rational—what he calls "cortex"—impressions of consumers and tapping into their deeper, "reptilian" responses. And what Rapaille concluded from countless, intensive sessions with car buyers was that when S.U.V. buyers thought about safety they were thinking about something that reached into their deepest unconscious. "The No. 1 feeling is that everything surrounding you should be round and soft, and should give," Rapaille told me. "There should be air bags everywhere. Then there's this notion that you need to be up high. That's a contradiction, because the people who buy these S.U.V.s know at the cortex level that if you are high there is more chance of a rollover. But at the reptilian level they think that if I am bigger and taller I'm safer. You feel secure because you are higher and dominate and look down. That you can look down is psychologically a very powerful notion. And what was the key element of safety when you were a child? It was that your mother fed you, and there was warm liquid. That's why cupholders are absolutely crucial for safety. If there is a car that has no cupholder, it is not safe. If I can put my coffee there, if I can have my food, if everything is round, if it's soft, and if I'm high, then I feel safe. It's amazing that intelligent, educated women will look at a car and the first thing they will look at is how many cupholders it has. " During the design of Chrysler's PT Cruiser, one of the things Rapaille learned was that car buyers felt unsafe when they thought that an outsider could easily see inside their vehicles. So Chrysler made the back window of the PT Cruiser smaller. Of course, making windows smaller—and thereby reducing visibility—makes driving more dangerous, not less so. But that's the puzzle of what has happened to the automobile world: feeling safe has become more important than actually being safe.
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Replying to: larsb (Jan 13, 2009 1:39 pm) http://www.iihs.org/research/hldi/fact_sheets/personal_injury_coverage_05to07.pd- f
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Replying to: larsb (Jan 13, 2009 1:39 pm) An what about Prius drivers? I understand that they tend to be anal-retentive control freaks who want to feel superior to others and dictate what others are allowed to drive. See I can make up stuff too.  I never saw much use for an SUV, they are a bad compromise between a car and a truck and don't do the job of either very well. That said, it's not my business to tell others how to spend their money. |
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Replying to: gagrice (Jan 13, 2009 3:32 pm) Their thinking is that a full-sized sedan gives you the best combination of maneuverability - to help you avoid an accident in the 1st place - & crashworthiness - to help you survive the accident that you can't avoid. I'm a sedan/sport coupe guy myself, but I believe that if you came by your money honestly, you should drive whatever you want to drive as long as you can afford it. If I don't like your choice, that's my tough luck. |
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Replying to: oldfarmer50 (Jan 13, 2009 3:44 pm) See I can make up stuff too. They're also very smug, to the point of sniffing their own farts. At least, they were on "South Park" 
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Replying to: oldfarmer50 (Jan 13, 2009 3:44 pm) They got that data from interviewing REAL people as professional psychologists.
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Replying to: larsb (Jan 14, 2009 6:10 am) You can also get the same kind of information about Hybrid drivers. It is the same old SUV haters vs hybrid haters. It has nothing to do with those that foolishly sell an SUV at a big loss when gas prices are high. I’ve always made cracks at the Prius and Prius owners, never really addressing the topic head on because I figured everyone knew that the car was a joke and it’s drivers were stupid *&^*^% (continued) http://www.misanthropytoday.com/2008/04/29/misanthropy-today-hates-the-prius/
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Replying to: gagrice (Jan 14, 2009 7:41 am) I'll take Smug over Dead any time........
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Replying to: larsb (Jan 14, 2009 7:48 am) I'll take Smug over Dead any time. Not sure your point. You are not going to suggest that a Prius is as safe as a Large SUV? IF so you are all wet and have no legitimate data to back that up.
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