THE JOY OF SPORT-UTILITY VEHICLES

Over the past two decades, millions of Americans have made the same choice. And a significant slice of the federal regulatory apparatus has recoiled in horror. The bureaucratic hostility to this quite reasonable shift in consumer habits shows Washington regulators at their worst, digging in their heels and asserting — contrary to the facts — their supposed moral superiority over the consumer hordes.

The brawl over sport-utility vehicles began in the 1970s when the government decided that Americans were using too much gasoline and that the best way to stop this wanton waste of a scarce resource, oil, was to order manufacturers to produce more fuel-efficient cars. Car-makers discovered that they had to reduce the weight of the vehicles they were producing to comply with the new order — which they proceeded to do, with two consequences, one intended, one quite unintended. The intended consequence was to cut gasoline consumption; the unintended one was to force Americans into cars that have proved to be less safe than the big buggies that so offended Washington policymakers.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the small-car heaven that environmentalists and their political allies intended us to enter. Two funny things, actually. First, the threatened shortage of oil that regulators used as their excuse for imposing fuel-efficiency standards turned into a worldwide glut that has driven the price of gasoline below that of Perrier water. Second, Americans decided in increasing numbers that they don’t like squeezing their families into small, flimsy cars, especially with gasoline increasingly affordable. With the supply of large cars artificially restricted by the federal fuel-efficiency regulations, consumers turned to the more open market of sport-utility vehicles, full-sized pickup trucks, small pick-ups, minivans, and full-sized vans. In 1996, all of these types of vehicles (known as LTVs in bureaucratic argot) accounted for more than 43 percent of all passenger-vehicle sales. As a result of their increasing popularity, LTVs now account for 34 percent of all passenger-vehicle registrations in the country, up from 20 percent in 1980.

As our ancient sage could have predicted, the popularity of pickups and minivans and sport-utility vehicles is bad news for small cars. These new cruisers of America’s roads and off-roads weigh some 900 pounds more than the average passenger car. Moreover, they sit higher on the road; when they collide with lighter and lower passenger cars, they tend to hit them in places where the passengers of the smaller cars are relatively unprotected. The result, says the NHTSA, is that “traffic crashes between an LTV and any other light vehicle now account for a majority of fatalities in vehicle-to- vehicle collisions.”

So the statistics show. In 1996, 41,207 people died in traffic accidents, 35,579 of them within their vehicles. Crashes between LTVs and cars resulted in 5,259 fatalities. Of these, 81 percent, or 4,260 fatalities, occurred in the cars. Clearly, the passengers in the larger vehicles came out ahead. But that doesn’t make the LTVs the villains of the piece. Because it’s not just the mismatch in size that makes cars less safe. Fatal crashes between two cars caused 4,013 deaths, while LTV-LTV crashes resulted in far fewer fatalities: 1,225. Even if we correct for the difference in the numbers of each type of vehicle on the road, it seems obvious that if everyone drove an LTV, far fewer bodies would be hauled off the nation’s highways every year.

Yet, regulatory antipathy to LTVs mounts. This, even though the number of fatalities from auto accidents is not primarily a function of the type of vehicle involved in the crash. For that proposition we have the word of no less an expert than the administrator of the NHTSA himself. Ricardo Martinez told the Washington Post, “We have about 12 million vehicle crashes annually in this country, and by far the most serious of those — the fatals – – involve one form or another of high-risk driver behavior.” Such high-risk behavior includes everything from disregarding traffic lights and driving under the influence of alcohol, to failing to buckle up properly. Indeed, Jim Hall, chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, estimates that 64 percent of the 35,579 passengers who died in their vehicles after crashes were either unbelted or improperly belted. All in all, the NHTSA estimates that every dollar it invests in changing driver behavior produces six. times greater benefits than a dollar invested in vehicle-crash protection.

Nevertheless, the regulators are in full cry against sport-utility vehicles, minivans, and pickups, demanding that millions be invested in their redesign to make them lower and lighter, and that they be subjected to the same fuel- efficiency standards that have forced down the weight and safety of cars. In short, regulators want to make LTVs less safe and more like the cars that their owners have rejected.

Among these eager regulation-writers, astonishingly, is the NHTSA, which thereby belies the very mission — highway-traffic safety — encoded in its name. Safety, it would seem, is not the real goal of the anti-LTV crowd. Indeed, in their jointly produced “Buying a Safer Car,” the NHTSA, the American Automobile Association, and the Federal Trade Commission advise, ” Crash data show that heavy vehicles offer more protection than light vehicles with the same safety equipment, particularly in two-vehicle crashes.” The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, which conducts crash tests for the insurance industry, agrees: “The laws of physics dictate that, all else being equal, larger and heavier vehicles are safer than smaller and lighter ones.” And a joint study by Harvard University and the Brookings Institution concluded that the 500-pound per car downsizing forced upon the industry by government-mandated fuel-efficiency standards translates into 2,200 to 3,900 additional traffic deaths per model year.

Yet the thrust of regulatory policy remains one of discouraging the production and purchase of large, safe cars and squeezing more and more Americans into small, less safe vehicles. The very language used by the NHTSA is instructive. It titles its studies of the consequences of crashes of different types of vehicles, “The Aggressivity of Light Trucks and Vans in Traffic Crashes.” According to the highway agency, the “aggressive” LTVs are ” fundamentally incompatible with cars in highway crashes” because they “are heavier, of more rugged construction, and have higher ground clearance than the passenger cars with which they share the road.” Consider another, equally accurate way of stating the problem. The study might be entitled, “The Vulnerability of Small Cars in Traffic Crashes.” These “vulnerable” cars, it might be said, “are lighter, of flimsier construction, and have lower ground clearance” than LTVs, and are therefore “fundamentally incompatible with the larger, safer vehicles with which they share the road.”

But truth-in-advertising is not what the auto regulators are all about. If they were really interested in steering people into safer vehicles, argues John D. Graham, director of the Harvard University Center for Risk Analysis, regulators would provide consumers with safety ratings. He writes, “The sticker price on a new car includes the mileage rating, but there is no safety rating. . . . Consumers are told nothing about the safety risks of smaller, lighter cars, even though the government has the legal authority to design a safety rating system for new vehicles.” And, he might well have added, even though buried in the NHTSA’s own study of so-called “vehicle aggressivity” is the finding that “larger cars are more crashworthy than smaller cars.”

Indeed, if safety really troubled the regulators, they would scrap fuel- efficiency standards and press manufacturers to produce more heavy cars. But they won’t. So what is really bothering them? Surely not a worry that the world is running out of oil with which to keep these big cars rolling on America’s highways. True, environmentalists and varied anti-growth activists have been warning for some time that the world will soon suck out all of the oil God put in the earth. But the fact is that the world is awash in oil. Supplies are so ample they are driving the price of oil down to levels that make it increasingly foolish to spend lives to save gallons, as the government does when it artificially restricts the availability of heavy cars on the market.

If not safety, and not oil conservation, perhaps the new urge to prevent global warming lies behind the antipathy to LTVs. After all, in his apocalyptic Earth in the Balance, Vice President Al Gore designates “the unrestrained burning of cheap fossil fuels” as one of the villains in the ” deteriorating global environment.”

Unfortunately for those who purport to base their hostility to LTVs, and especially to sport-utility vehicles, on environmental grounds, the data don’t provide them much comfort. In his recently published Driving America (AEI Press), James Johnston, an AEI scholar and former auto- industry executive, analyzes government data on the sources of the carbon- dioxide emissions that are said to contribute to global warming. He concludes that if all gasoline-burning cars, vans, sport-utility vehicles, and light pickup trucks were removed from the roads in America, worldwide carbon- dioxide emissions from all sources would be reduced by eighteen one- hundredths of one percent, and from manmade sources by 4 percent, “hardly a significant step in rolling back carbon dioxide.” And motor vehicles contribute an even smaller portion of water vapor, supposedly the most threatening of the greenhouse gases. “[This] means that programs that would require further reduction in size and weight of motor vehicles to increase fuel economy would have no real effect on the global climate but would further erode the safety provided by larger, heavier vehicles,” concludes Johnston.

Lest you think that Johnston’s former affiliation with the auto industry colors his judgment, consider the conclusion of Robert W. Crandall, the Brookings Institution scholar who is one of the nation’s most highly regarded students of the regulatory process. “To attempt to control global warming by reducing fuel consumption in new U.S. light-duty vehicles is not only inefficient; it is futile.” Crandall goes on to call for an end to regulations mandating increases in fuel efficiency; the vehicle-weight reductions those rules require kill several thousand people every year, “a terrible price for an ill-conceived economic policy.”

Which brings us to the real reasons that regulators want to curb big vehicles. Start with the fact that sport-utility vehicles, pickups, and other LTVs are, after all, instruments of personal mobility. You go where you want to go, whenever you want to go there if you own your own set of wheels — a fact that has not been lost on the nation’s teenagers ever since the motor car became ubiquitous. Contrast this with the mass-transit facilities so beloved of liberals and city planners. The central authority determines the spot at which you may begin your journey, the place at which you may end it, and the schedule on which you may proceed. It also determines how much money will be spent on the transportation facility, whether it is to have amenities such as air conditioning, and what you will pay to use it. And it has the warm glow that comes to the heart of a left-leaning bureaucrat from the fact that everyone is equal: No more Mercedes for the rich and Chevy Geo Metros for the poor; instead, a one-class subway strap for all. When it turns out that you prefer your car to a planner’s mass transit, the central authority responds by taxing your car and using taxpayer funds to subsidize its pet, mass transit.

This liberal antipathy to the car is in marked contrast to conservatives’ fondness for it. Liberals see the car as an instrument of destruction, destroying lives in accidents, communities because of the required highway construction (a waste of funds that they feel could better be used to finance the welfare state), and the environment.

Al Gore tells us that “the wild things” are forced to flee from construction sites: “Most of the deer were hit by cars.” Paul Kennedy, in his bestselling Preparing for the Twenty-first Century, says it is difficult and costly to cut emissions of carbon dioxide from factories. But that matters little, for “the real issue is the need to cut emissions by vehicle engine combustion,” a goal he would accomplish with the usual list of liberal measures: stiff rises in gasoline prices, still-higher taxes on “gas-guzzling” automobiles, and more investment in mass transit.

The World Resources Institute goes even further. “We can no longer assume it is our God-given right to drive, alone, anywhere we please.” Instead of the freedom of the road, we are to live in high-density urban developments ” where walking, bicycling, and public transportation are both possible and enjoyable.”

Contrast this with the conservative view of the automobile. George Will extols what he calls “the virtues of automobility. . . . An open road produces an open society. The automobile has been an emancipating device. . . . Were Huck [Finn] to light out for the territories today, he would go in a Ford Explorer. . . . In the land of the automobile, every man’s a king.”

Not only do sport-utility vehicles represent the sort of personal mobility that is anathema to big-government advocates (the vehicles’ little-used but nevertheless available off-road capability makes them independent even of highways). They are, well, big. Bigger than government bureaucrats think they need to be. Here we run into a long-standing characteristic of government bureaucrats, the sumptuary mentality. Since as early as 500 B.C., governments have been passing laws to restrict private consumption, to prevent what the authorities see as extravagance in dress, entertainment, and food consumption, by regulating everything from the amount of gold thread in a garment to the number of chickens that might be consumed at a feast.

It was not so long ago that Jimmy Carter promulgated a set of rules telling us how high we might set our thermostats in the winter, and how low in the summer, and decided that we did not need hot water in washrooms in federally operated facilities such as airports. “Owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning,” he said, presaging the day when government would decide that we must buy toilets that use what proves to be an insufficient amount of water to flush away the consequences of our excessive consumption.

So too with big sport-utility vehicles. Bureaucrats are quick to sneer that their off-road capability is rarely used by the suburban moms who increasingly favor them and that they are grotesquely large for most of the uses to which they are put. Never mind that the very characteristics that so offend the anti-sport-utility crowd are what attracts consumers — the safety inherent in vehicle weight, the better road visibility inherent in the higher- riding vehicles, the improved bad-weather roadability of four-wheel-drive vehicles, and not least the sheer fun of playing macho-truck-driver-cum- western-rancher. Fun, alas, is not a variable that bureaucrats include in their regulatory equations.

So the feds are putting pressure on the automakers to change the design of light trucks, sport-utility vehicles, and vans to reduce the effects they have on smaller cars when collisions occur. Do so voluntarily, says the NHTSA, or we will promulgate regulations to force you to do so.

In response to this pressure, some manufacturers are incorporating into the design of new vehicles such changes as lower bumpers, less rigid frames, and lighter components — risking, according to some experts, the safety of the vehicles’ occupants in order to make them more “compatible” with the less safe, smaller cars the government has forced on the American driver. Other car-makers want to stiffen the sides of passenger cars, to reduce the impact of collisions with larger vehicles, but they hesitate because the added weight would increase fuel consumption. And that would upset government regulators, who remain committed to saving unprecious fuel at the expense of precious lives.

Irwin M. Stelzer is director of regulatory policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.