Ouu la la, am getting copies of this book to distribute .. hehehe
09-17-2002, 10:41 AM
#1
Ouu la la, am getting copies of this book to distribute .. hehehe
The author drives a TT ;-D
Copyright 2002 Detroit Free Press
All Rights Reserved
Detroit Free Press
September 17, 2002 Tuesday 0 EDITION
LENGTH: 1097 words
HEADLINE: TOM WALSH: SUVs unsafe at all times, author says;
Builders and buyers are in for a bashing
BYLINE: TOM WALSH FREE PRESS COLUMNIST
BODY:
Detroit's top auto executives, plus legions of Explorer, Grand Cherokee, Durango, Navigator and Tahoe owners, will be squirming -- and probably fuming -- over publication today of a provocative book, "High and Mighty: SUVs, the World's Most Dangerous Vehicles and How They Got That Way."
This book assaults sport-utility vehicles with a gusto recalling Ralph Nader's 1965 broadside against the Corvair in "Unsafe at Any Speed."
Written by New York Times correspondent Keith Bradsher, "High and Mighty" (Public Affairs, $28) bashes auto companies, auto buyers, the government and even Sierra Club tree huggers for the sport-utility vehicle craze that Bradsher claims is killing thousands of people and wrecking the environment.
Do you drive an SUV? If so, don't read the next quote with food in your mouth. Here's what Bradsher writes about SUV buyers:
"They tend to be people who are insecure and vain. They are frequently nervous about their marriages and uncomfortable about parenthood. They often lack confidence in their driving skills. Above all, they are apt to be self-centered and self-absorbed, with little interest in their neighbors or communities."
Bradsher's favorite word to describe SUVs is "menacing," which he uses nine times in one five-page passage discussing the kill-or-be-killed psychology of SUV drivers. (The Free Press will run excerpts from the "Reptile Dreams" chapter of the book Thursday in the Motor City section.)
Bradsher was Detroit bureau chief for the Times from 1996 to 2001; he now runs the paper's Hong Kong bureau. He'll be in Detroit next week doing media interviews, as part of a national book promotion tour that includes stops in New York, Washington, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle.
"We're only at the beginning of the SUV problem," Bradsher told me from Hong Kong in a phone interview Monday, predicting that deaths and injuries will multiply as older-model used SUVs are purchased and driven by teenagers.
In the book's introduction, Bradsher spells out his premise, branding SUVs as gas guzzlers that "roll over too easily, killing and injuring occupants at an alarming rate, and are dangerous to other road users, inflicting catastrophic damage to cars that they hit and posing a lethal threat to pedestrians."
Don't expect top-level executives of General Motors Corp., Ford Motor Co. or DaimlerChrysler AG to be debating Bradsher in public. They don't want to give the book extra attention; and they sniff privately that it's mostly a rehash of articles that ran in the Times several years ago, which Bradsher disputes.
But that doesn't mean the auto industry will sit mutely and not contest the book's chief claims that SUVs have high rollover rates and inflict more death and mayhem in crashes than other vehicles.
The Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, the industry trade group, has hired Strat@comm, a public affairs firm with Detroit and Washington offices, to marshal data and arguments for rebuttal of "High and Mighty" claims regarding crash data, fuel economy and other issues. Key officials of Strat@comm include Diane Steed, former administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, and Jason Vines, former communications vice president for Ford during the brouhaha over Ford Explorers and Firestone tire failures.
Strat@comm has created a 15-page document titled "SUV Allegations and Facts" that is a point-by-point attack on Bradsher's book. And the firm will happily refer journalists to an even more detailed 70-page compilation of responses to what it considers common myths and off-base claims about SUVs.
Provocative point of view
So what should an average book reader, or vehicle buyer, make of "High and Mighty" and the inevitable cries of foul from the auto industry?
First, in the interest of full disclosure, it should be noted that my family vehicles are a 2002 Jeep Grand Cherokee, a 2000 Ford Taurus and a 1996 Eagle Vision. If that makes me insecure and vain when I'm behind the wheel of the Jeep and sensible when driving the Taurus, well, I don't take the psycho-profiling personally. (For the record, Bradsher and his family drove a 2002 Audi TT and a 1999 Mercury Sable before leaving Detroit earlier this year.)
Bradsher's book is a full-tilt polemic, in the vein of Nader's "Unsafe at Any Speed," to which it will inevitably be compared. It takes a provocative point of view and argues it passionately.
Is it persuasive? Sometimes. There's little question that SUVs are more prone to roll over than most cars and vans. And the safety implications of design incompatibility -- big vehicles with high bumpers smashing into low-riding cars -- should be debated and studied.
That said, Bradsher faces a daunting task to convince the public that SUVs are a huge menace to society, when in fact, the overall rate of U.S. highway deaths has dropped by 50 percent since the mid-1980s, even as sales of SUVs jumped by 600 percent.
And Bradsher, in his zeal to demonize the SUV, may turn off even his most supportive audiences by insulting them.
It's no surprise that he would trash a big SUV like Cadillac Escalade as having the "ride quality of a pig on stilts." Or even that he would belittle the Detroit automotive media as hometown cheerleaders, "dominated by a small contingent of reporters who have been covering the industry for decades and often share the industry's hostility toward any criticism of automobiles."
But Bradsher also charges that NHTSA, the federal safety agency, was "asleep" on the Ford-Firestone case.
And he even jabs environmentalists, the most likely support group for "High and Mighty," charging that they've been slow to criticize SUVs. "Mechanical engineering has appealed less to environmentalists than paddling around among endangered whales and coral reefs, or planting trees in deforested regions of the Himalayas," he writes.
Vines, the former Ford PR chief, complains that Bradsher has crossed over from journalist to advocate, and reverted to name-calling because his premise about SUV dangers is unsound.
I figure if Bradsher wants to write a book, he ought to have a point of view and not pussyfoot around with it. And if the barbs sting a bit, that's OK -- Detroit can handle a little spirited sniping.
But it's a bit much, even for me, to read that Chrysler executives wanted to use tinted rear windows to give a "more menacing image" to the PT Cruiser.
Yep, even the cuddly Cruiser can be menacing in "High and Mighty."
Contact TOM WALSH at twalsh@freepress.com or 313-223-4430.
LOAD-DATE: September 17, 2002
Copyright 2002 Detroit Free Press
All Rights Reserved
Detroit Free Press
September 17, 2002 Tuesday 0 EDITION
LENGTH: 1097 words
HEADLINE: TOM WALSH: SUVs unsafe at all times, author says;
Builders and buyers are in for a bashing
BYLINE: TOM WALSH FREE PRESS COLUMNIST
BODY:
Detroit's top auto executives, plus legions of Explorer, Grand Cherokee, Durango, Navigator and Tahoe owners, will be squirming -- and probably fuming -- over publication today of a provocative book, "High and Mighty: SUVs, the World's Most Dangerous Vehicles and How They Got That Way."
This book assaults sport-utility vehicles with a gusto recalling Ralph Nader's 1965 broadside against the Corvair in "Unsafe at Any Speed."
Written by New York Times correspondent Keith Bradsher, "High and Mighty" (Public Affairs, $28) bashes auto companies, auto buyers, the government and even Sierra Club tree huggers for the sport-utility vehicle craze that Bradsher claims is killing thousands of people and wrecking the environment.
Do you drive an SUV? If so, don't read the next quote with food in your mouth. Here's what Bradsher writes about SUV buyers:
"They tend to be people who are insecure and vain. They are frequently nervous about their marriages and uncomfortable about parenthood. They often lack confidence in their driving skills. Above all, they are apt to be self-centered and self-absorbed, with little interest in their neighbors or communities."
Bradsher's favorite word to describe SUVs is "menacing," which he uses nine times in one five-page passage discussing the kill-or-be-killed psychology of SUV drivers. (The Free Press will run excerpts from the "Reptile Dreams" chapter of the book Thursday in the Motor City section.)
Bradsher was Detroit bureau chief for the Times from 1996 to 2001; he now runs the paper's Hong Kong bureau. He'll be in Detroit next week doing media interviews, as part of a national book promotion tour that includes stops in New York, Washington, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle.
"We're only at the beginning of the SUV problem," Bradsher told me from Hong Kong in a phone interview Monday, predicting that deaths and injuries will multiply as older-model used SUVs are purchased and driven by teenagers.
In the book's introduction, Bradsher spells out his premise, branding SUVs as gas guzzlers that "roll over too easily, killing and injuring occupants at an alarming rate, and are dangerous to other road users, inflicting catastrophic damage to cars that they hit and posing a lethal threat to pedestrians."
Don't expect top-level executives of General Motors Corp., Ford Motor Co. or DaimlerChrysler AG to be debating Bradsher in public. They don't want to give the book extra attention; and they sniff privately that it's mostly a rehash of articles that ran in the Times several years ago, which Bradsher disputes.
But that doesn't mean the auto industry will sit mutely and not contest the book's chief claims that SUVs have high rollover rates and inflict more death and mayhem in crashes than other vehicles.
The Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, the industry trade group, has hired Strat@comm, a public affairs firm with Detroit and Washington offices, to marshal data and arguments for rebuttal of "High and Mighty" claims regarding crash data, fuel economy and other issues. Key officials of Strat@comm include Diane Steed, former administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, and Jason Vines, former communications vice president for Ford during the brouhaha over Ford Explorers and Firestone tire failures.
Strat@comm has created a 15-page document titled "SUV Allegations and Facts" that is a point-by-point attack on Bradsher's book. And the firm will happily refer journalists to an even more detailed 70-page compilation of responses to what it considers common myths and off-base claims about SUVs.
Provocative point of view
So what should an average book reader, or vehicle buyer, make of "High and Mighty" and the inevitable cries of foul from the auto industry?
First, in the interest of full disclosure, it should be noted that my family vehicles are a 2002 Jeep Grand Cherokee, a 2000 Ford Taurus and a 1996 Eagle Vision. If that makes me insecure and vain when I'm behind the wheel of the Jeep and sensible when driving the Taurus, well, I don't take the psycho-profiling personally. (For the record, Bradsher and his family drove a 2002 Audi TT and a 1999 Mercury Sable before leaving Detroit earlier this year.)
Bradsher's book is a full-tilt polemic, in the vein of Nader's "Unsafe at Any Speed," to which it will inevitably be compared. It takes a provocative point of view and argues it passionately.
Is it persuasive? Sometimes. There's little question that SUVs are more prone to roll over than most cars and vans. And the safety implications of design incompatibility -- big vehicles with high bumpers smashing into low-riding cars -- should be debated and studied.
That said, Bradsher faces a daunting task to convince the public that SUVs are a huge menace to society, when in fact, the overall rate of U.S. highway deaths has dropped by 50 percent since the mid-1980s, even as sales of SUVs jumped by 600 percent.
And Bradsher, in his zeal to demonize the SUV, may turn off even his most supportive audiences by insulting them.
It's no surprise that he would trash a big SUV like Cadillac Escalade as having the "ride quality of a pig on stilts." Or even that he would belittle the Detroit automotive media as hometown cheerleaders, "dominated by a small contingent of reporters who have been covering the industry for decades and often share the industry's hostility toward any criticism of automobiles."
But Bradsher also charges that NHTSA, the federal safety agency, was "asleep" on the Ford-Firestone case.
And he even jabs environmentalists, the most likely support group for "High and Mighty," charging that they've been slow to criticize SUVs. "Mechanical engineering has appealed less to environmentalists than paddling around among endangered whales and coral reefs, or planting trees in deforested regions of the Himalayas," he writes.
Vines, the former Ford PR chief, complains that Bradsher has crossed over from journalist to advocate, and reverted to name-calling because his premise about SUV dangers is unsound.
I figure if Bradsher wants to write a book, he ought to have a point of view and not pussyfoot around with it. And if the barbs sting a bit, that's OK -- Detroit can handle a little spirited sniping.
But it's a bit much, even for me, to read that Chrysler executives wanted to use tinted rear windows to give a "more menacing image" to the PT Cruiser.
Yep, even the cuddly Cruiser can be menacing in "High and Mighty."
Contact TOM WALSH at twalsh@freepress.com or 313-223-4430.
LOAD-DATE: September 17, 2002
09-17-2002, 10:56 AM
#3
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Well....at least he has good taste in his choice of one of his vehicles ;-)
And I quote "(For the record, Bradsher and his family drove a 2002 Audi TT and a 1999 Mercury Sable before leaving Detroit earlier this year.)"
09-17-2002, 11:01 AM
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Oh, but Den......
You can't do neat tricks like this unless you have a kewl SUV>>>>
<img src="http://www.lexam.net/peter/carnut/suv-gaspump2.jpg">
I'm thinking of picking up something like this for winter driving>>>>
<img src="http://www.pacificpowerbatteries.com/GRAPHICS/gallery/suv.jpg">
One like this for the track>>>>
<img src="http://www.nhra.com/2001/news/april/images/suv.jpg">
And one like this for hauling my TT around>>>>
<img src="http://www.business2.com/images/mag/MINI1.jpg">
<img src="http://www.lexam.net/peter/carnut/suv-gaspump2.jpg">
I'm thinking of picking up something like this for winter driving>>>>
<img src="http://www.pacificpowerbatteries.com/GRAPHICS/gallery/suv.jpg">
One like this for the track>>>>
<img src="http://www.nhra.com/2001/news/april/images/suv.jpg">
And one like this for hauling my TT around>>>>
<img src="http://www.business2.com/images/mag/MINI1.jpg">
