Columnist Scott Dickensheets: Some people have FITs over SUVs

Scott Dickensheets

Tuesday, May 26, 1998 | 10:15 a.m.

NINE MONTHS later, I still remember my liberal friend's crinkled eyebrows. "You bought a sport utility vehicle?" he asked, plainly alarmed for my soul. Well, not exactly, big fella -- my wife picked it out. But yes, the family ride is now undeniably a yuppie status symbol. It's sitting out in front of the house right now, alerting all who pass that a callow, image-conscious chaser of trends lives within.

Except, of course, that a lot of passers-by will also be piloting sport utility vehicles. Since I drive with a single-minded concentration on whatever slow-rolling grannymobile is impeding my progress on a given day, I hadn't really noticed the rising number of SUVs on the road. Until we bought one. Now I see that every fourth vehicle is a sport ute, every third of those seemingly a white Isuzu Rodeo like ours.

Some find this proliferation bothersome. "We want to talk you out of purchasing a sport utility vehicle or to drag you out of the one you are currently driving," announces "The Ultimate Poseur Sport Utility Page," "the first anti-SUV page on the Web." Their beef? Similar to my friend's: people buying ungainly, faux off-road vehicles for the wrong reasons, to "be trendy," to "look tough," to appear to be the sort of guy who might lurch off-road at any minute, when, in fact, the toughest use of those 4x4 capabilities will be the grueling trek to Starbucks.

What the website doesn't achieve by name-calling -- SUV owners are constantly derided as either "lemmings" or "poseurs" -- it seeks to accomplish through wan humor. From a list of 10 signs of a true poseur: "Dreams he is nearing the peak of a remote mountain whenever he drives over a speed bump."

"Only 13 percent are driven off-road," author Ros Davidson harrumphed in a December article on the more credible Salon website. "They're expensive, guzzle huge amounts of gas and emit a lot of pollution" (because they're frequently classified as light trucks, granting them less-restrictive emissions standards).

Davidson quotes Kim Hazelbaker of the Highway Loss Data Institute, an insurance-industry numbers-crunching group, on the safety of SUVs in crashes with smaller cars: "It's good for the occupants of the SUV, but not for the occupants of the other vehicle," Hazelbaker says.

Before you can say praised by faint damns, Hazelbaker attacks the SUV attitude. "One of the aspects people really like about SUVs is the feeling of invulnerability." You sit up high, you feel like king of all the asphalt you survey. This anti-sport-ute charge sheet has been aired often lately in newspapers and magazines.

I thought that, in my case, at least, the poseur charges might be dropped because my SUV is a two-wheel drive. I'm obviously not trying to pose as a manly off-roader. Alas, in the eyes of the world's first anti-SUV website, that just makes me a "true poseur," my pretension the more galling for my refusal to recognize that I really should be driving a station wagon.

Well, I have driven a station wagon, as well as a minivan, and, as a guy with three kids and all their crap to haul around, I prefer an SUV. The minivan was like a barge, the station wagon like a much lower barge. The SUV is an ideal compromise. I like sitting up high. I like that feeling of invulnerability.

Anyway, don't blame SOBs in SUVs for nasty traffic -- everyone in Las Vegas thinks they're king of the road.