DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Mark Morford’s SUV column is over the top and worth an immediate read: Are Hummer Owners Idiots? - More delightful proof positive that most SUVs are, in fact, morally repugnant. Go, America!

Just in time to crush a few thousand smaller cars and kill a bunch of pedestrians and poison the environment and still be able to traverse six feet of standing floodwater in order to make it in time for Timmy’s soccer game, it’s the rollout of the new Hummer H2, the biggest joke of the entire SUV world, representing, well, just exactly everything that’s wrong with America’s view of the world.

Beyond the comic value of his indignation, some of the statistics are downright frightening: “the Chevy Tahoe kills 122 people for every 1 million models on the road; by comparison, the Honda Accord kills only 21 per 1 million such vehicle.” In simpler terms, this SUV is 5 times more dangerous than a given passenger car. Perhaps not to the driver — just to everyone else.

Also worth an immediate read is the source article Morford quotes, Bumper Mentality by Stephanie Mencimer of the Washington Monthly.

One step further back into the ancestry of this diatribe is Keith Bradsher’s new book, High and Mighty: SUVs — The World’s Most Dangerous Vehicles and How They Got That Way, which just went onto my reading list.