Cars - Part 2

SUV's. My first car was a utility vehicle…long before they were called utility vehicles—the “sport” part of it hadn’t been invented yet. No, those utility vehicles of long ago were called what they were (& are), trucks, jeeps, and station wagons. People bought them for specific purposes rather than as showy “bling” on wheels.

I’ve grown to strongly dislike SUV’s and their drivers. Unintentionally favorable asset depreciation laws favored the use of Mercedes and BMW cars as company vehicles in the eighties. And similar laws influenced use of the leather upholstered, Bose laden, overstuffed $50,000 trucks masquerading, under a clever manipulation of the language, as tax havens for small businesses and professionals during the nineties and naughts. A fad that Detroit merrily fed, as it and our younger citizens utterly ignored our seventies experience with fuel shortages. So an entire new generation of hard chargers embraced these gas guzzling SUV behemoths in an orgasm of wretched excess, in its way even more silly than a Mercedes company car. The common thread—tax law.

I must admit having some pleasure last summer as gas went to $4.50/gallon and the SUV crowd howled as they learned the lesson that we touched in the seventies. Why do I dislike the SUV crowd? I think it’s their insufferable selfishness. When asked why they wanted the large, 4WD vehicles for highway use, the most frequent response I recall was that it made them feel safe. Of course the converse of that observation amounts to a “screw you” to anyone driving smaller cars—"I’ll be O.K. in my big bastard…up yours."

Even more irritating about the SUV proliferation is that those like me who are driving smaller cars cannot see through or around or over the big bastards. The roads and parking spaces became stuffed with their bloat everywhere. Where I used to be polite and wave forward a driver wanting to enter traffic from a driveway or side street, now if they are driving a SUV, I am no longer courteous and seek to prevent them from getting in front of me.

Why?

True or False…A is to B as C is to D?

And if you must view the rear end of another, which would you prefer?

Adios